Researchers compared phosphate oxygen isotopes in the teeth of seabream bones found at archaeological sites in Israel dating from 10,000 years ago to about 1,400 years ago. Their comparison found that from about 3,500 years ago, nearly all of the seabream eaten in the land of Israel came from a single place — the Bardawil lagoon on the Mediterranean coast of northern Sinai.
The lagoon was created by the formation of sand breakers built up by the natural movement of currents eastward from the Nile delta. It is replenished with water from the surrounding Mediterranean through two small inlets, but the exchange of seawater is small enough to allow for the formation of a distinctive marine ecosystem.
This ecosystem’s most important attribute for the new research: The separation of the Bardawil lake from the rest of the Mediterranean allows for a higher rate of evaporation, making its waters saltier. That higher salinity, in turn, can be read in the phosphate oxygen isotope balance in the teeth and jawbones of fish that are born and spend their lives in the lake.
At about 1,500 BCE, they discovered, the farming of seabream at Bardawil, which lies on the northern Sinai road between Egypt and Israel, took off and became the chief source of the beloved fish not only for inland cities, but even for coastal ones, possibly replacing their own domestic fishing industry.
That period also saw a stabilization in the size of the seabream being consumed in the land of Israel, the scientists report, a finding that further strengthens the case for the start of wide-scale aquaculture in the period. Fish consumed before 3,500 years ago came in many sizes, reflecting their ages and the various locations from which they were farmed. But once aquaculture was underway at Bardawil, it began producing consistent “plate-sized” fish weighing roughly 500 grams.
The research was led by Guy Sisma-Ventura of Haifa University’s National Institute of Oceanography, and included Haifa University archaeologists Ayelet Gilboa, Guy Bar-Oz and Omri Lernau, historian Dorit Sivan, Irit Zohar from Oranim College, and professors Andreas Pack of the University of Göttingen and Thomas Tütken of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
