Food
Bones recovered in the excavation included 74 species of fish and shellfish, but only eight species of land animals. Oysters were the most common food consumed. Other shellfish included quahogs, surf clams, scallops, whelks and conchs. The large number of fish bones recovered allowed for a detailed analysis. Almost all of the fish were small and of the same size. The archaeologists theorize that the fish were caught in nets with a mesh size of about 1/4 inch. As the nets would have had to be pulled by hand, bigger fish would have been able to escape by leaping over the net or swimming away before the net was closed. Carbonized plant seeds were found in hearths and living areas. These included the tiny seeds of a panicoid grass, and sea grape, cocoplum, prickly pear and wild grape.
Read more about this topic: Horr's Island Archaeological Site
Famous quotes containing the word food:
“Hume, and other skeptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expense. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow that will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;” and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We can come up with a working definition of life, which is what we did for the Viking mission to Mars. We said we could think in terms of a large molecule made up of carbon compounds that can replicate, or make copies of itself, and metabolize food and energy. So that’s the thought: macrocolecule, metabolism, replication.”
—Cyril Ponnamperuma (b. 1923)