Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2005, Page 44

Yekaterina Krivogorskaya, Sophia Perdikaris &Thomas H. McGovern
Figure 7. Distribution of reconstructed cod fish live length for the early medieval layers at
Gjögur and Akurvík. The early Akurvík distribution is more heavily weighted towards optimal
klipfisk production, while Gjögur is consistently peaking in the klipfisk window than in the later
contexts at the same site.
unimodal distribution centered around 60
cm reconstructed live length at Gjögur,
and a bimodal distribution at Akurvík
with peaks at around 60 cm and around
80 cm.
Figure 7 presents the same live
length reconstructions on premaxillae
and dentaries for the earlier medieval
contexts at Akurvík and Gjögur. In this
case, the earlier Gjögur cod length recon-
structions again indicate focus on the
smaller individuals, while the Akurvík
dentary and premaxillar reconstructions
indicate a dual focus, but one more heav-
ily weighted to the klipfisk. It would
appear that in both time periods, the físh-
ing farm at Gjögur and the físhing booths
at Akurvík were catching much the same
species of físh, but that Akurvík regular-
ly landed and prepared fish directly with-
in the stockfish window (particularly in
the late medieval period) and Gjögur did
not. Both sites appear to have consistently
landed and prepared cod in the middle of
the smaller klipfisk window. In neither
case are these distributions a result of a
random sample of the ancient local cod
population, which would presumably
have been dominated by much smaller
fish as today, but reflect a selective com-
bination of bait, depth, season, and físh-
ing ground.
Cod Ageing Methods
While periodicity has been easy to record
in other species such as salmon and in the
otolith of almost all species, archaeologi-
cally we rarely have the otolith and actu-
ally the bone structure of cod has been
proven extremely diffícult to read under
thin sectioning due to the confused struc-
ture and opaqueness of the bone. After
testing, however, the method that was
simplest and easiest has given the most
reliable results yet. The centrum of the
vertebra, shows a regular periodic struc-
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