Shellfish exploitation in southern France during the Roman period: definition of an "antique model " and recent findings
Résumé
In the 2000s, Anne Bardot-Cambot's academic work on the harvesting of marine shellfish during the Roman period in southern France built up a substantial base of knowledge that serves as a reference for archaeoconchyliological studies in this region. Since then, archaeological sites have provided further insights into various topics. Our communication will focus on recent contributions from archaeoconchyliology in a large part of southern France with the island of Corsica. These include the question of the consumption of Pecten jacobaeus, the extraction of porphyrogen from Muricidae and the acquisition of flat oysters Ostrea edulis. Moreover, discoveries of marine shells from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages have made it possible to identify 'markers of Antiquity'. They show that the antique shell trade came to an end around the seventh century. This trade went from being fairly standardised to fluctuating on the basis of several main species already known during the Roman period.