The prelude to industrial whaling: identifying the targets of ancient European whaling using zooarchaeology and collagen mass-peptide fingerprinting

• Main Authors: van den Hurk, Youri, Sikström, Fanny, Amkreutz, Luc, Nores Quesada, Carlos Ignacio
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Royal Society 2023
• Subjects: whaling; Ecology; zooarchaeology; historical ecology; whales; zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry; ballenas; caza de ballenas; zooarqueología; Ballenas; Eubalaena glacialis; North Atlantic; North Atlantic right whale
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10651/69670; https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6821419

Taxonomic identification of whale bones found during archaeological excavations is problematic due to their typically fragmented state. This difficulty limits understanding of both the past spatio-temporal distributions of whale populations and of possible early whaling activities. To overcome this...