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Dear Folks I am posting this to pass on some information on terminology for different types of Atlantic cod butchery from my friend and colleague Christian Keller (U Oslo) who has very kindly caught an error in how we have been naming what we think are archaeologically visible cuts of fish. I’d like to pass this on, as I think we may be guilty of spreading the incorrect term in some recent publications. Here is the background and terminology change suggested. In the Iron Age it appears that cod and other Gadidae were being caught in large numbers in the islands of arctic Norway and were preserved without salt by air drying (with temperatures fluctuating a few degrees around freezing) to produce products which have a very wood-like texture but which are very light, are nearly pure protein, and which keep without refrigeration or salting for several years. These methods seem to have spread more widely during the Viking age, and zooarchaeologists working in the N and W isles in Britain and in Iceland and Faroes have tended to use the Norwegian terms for their reconstruction of the preserved fish products they feel are represented in their bone collections (and which are still being produced in N Norway). One product has long been called “stockfish” in the literature, and this refers correctly to a cod that has been beheaded and gutted and then hung up to dry out in the round without salting. The cleithrum and other bones of the pectoral girdle are usually left in the body to keep it together and are spread out to help dry the interior of the fish. Archaeologically, stockfish thus are represented on consumer sites by high percentages of cleithra and by nearly natural proportions of thoracic, precaudal, and caudal vertebrae, and by reconstructed size ranges between about 60 -110 cm in live length. It is still OK to call this product “stockfish”, as there seems to be a strong historical connection between the term and the product we seem to be seeing archaeologically. The other product is made by splitting open the cod body to create a flat-dried product which could be spread on rocks or shingle beach to dry. This results in the removal and discard of the head (minus cleithrum and associated bones) and the upper vertebral elements (all thoracic and most pre-caudal vertebrae). The discard pile thus has more upper vertebrae, and the consumption site has a pattern of nearly all cleithra and caudal vertebrae. This product is best made with smaller fish in the ca 40-70 cm live length range, and apparently can be produced under a wider range of temperature conditions than the classic round-dried stockfish (thus can be made in areas with warmer winters or in different seasons). In later medieval times, this product was almost always produced with the aid of salting, and in this case it is correctly called “klipfisk”. This is the term we have been using for Iron Age and early Viking period archaeological element and size distributions which seem to match the flat dried pattern, but it seems that these earlier products were in fact just air dried and not salted. In this case, there is another term for this product- in Norwegian and Faroese this headless flat dried fish without salt would be correctly called råskjær rather than klipfisk. Christian notes the pronunciation problems English speakers are likely to have with this term, and suggests that the German Hanseatic term for the same product (and clearly derived from the Nordic term) “rotscher“ be used instead, as it is also linguistically a better match for the widely used “stockfish” for the round dried salt free product. So we should call the flat dried salted headless product klipfisk and the same product produced without salt (as is probable for the arctic Iron Age in Norway and the early Viking period elsewhere) “rotscher “. I hope this helps the probably tiny number of people concerned with such issues, but it seemed useful to try to get our cod terms right. If anyone is interested we do have some excel spreadsheets which work to automatically calculate and graph cod –family fish skeletal element distributions and also a bunch of sample element distribution profiles from both coastal producer and inland consumer sites which we will be glad to share. All the best, and many thanks for some very interesting recent discussion threads. Regards, Tom McGovern Thomas H McGovern Professor, Dept of Anthropology Hunter College CUNY Archaeology Coordinator, CUNY Doctoral Program in Anthropology Coordinator, North Atlantic Biocultural Organization Address: Anthropology Dept. Hunter College 695 Park Ave. NYC 10021 USA tel. 212 772 5410 fax. 212 772 5423 [log in to unmask]