Public Talk on “Fishing and Farming: the role of aquatic resources in the spread of the Neolithic”

American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC) Georgia Branch organizes a public talk on 
“Fishing and Farming: the role of aquatic resources in the spread of the Neolithic”

By Kenneth Charles Ritchie, Moesgård Museum, ARISC Fellow

Date: June 28, 18:00
Venue: Tbilisi State University, II block, III floor, room #339
Address: 3 Chavchavadze Ave., Tbilisi, Georgia

Aquatic resources played a key role in human history. In the Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods in many areas they were a central part of subsistence strategies. With the advent of isotopic studies of human bone to investigate diet, at first it appeared that fish and other aquatic foods almost disappeared from human diets during the Neolithic. New investigations and more sophisticated understanding of how to interpret archaeological data have led to a much more nuanced picture. Until now, little has been known about the role of fish in the Neolithic of Georgia. This project aims to complete the analysis of the first substantial assemblage of fish remains, from the Neolithic site of Aruchlo, to better understand how fishing helped to feed early farmers in the South Caucasus.

Kenneth Ritchie was born and lived most of his life in Wisconsin, with a few years in Minnesota, Florida and New Mexico. He earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010 with a dissertation on the Ertebølle (Mesolithic) Fisheries of Denmark. He has excavated on sites in the US, Denmark, Romania, Latvia and Bahrain, and worked on material from Norwegian, German and Georgian digs. Ritchie’s focus is particularly on early Stone Age groups in Northern Europe. He currently works at Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, Denmark and the Center for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology in Schleswig, Germany. He first came to Denmark in 2002 for excavations with Prof. T. Douglas Price and has lived there since 2006.  
Funding for this fellowship is provided by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs through a grant to the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC).

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ARISC is an American Overseas Research Center, an independent not-for-profit, that supports research in and about Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, both in the South Caucasus and the US. A member of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC), ARISC offers fellowships, programming and research support. ARISC does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, physical or mental disability, medical condition, ancestry, marital status, age, sexual orientation, citizenship, or status as a covered veteran.