The Protohistory of Pike in Western Culture

In prehistoric and undocumented pasts, Europeans treated pike as a food. Pike remains from human occupation sites affirm this for all periods since the early Neolithic, but the evidence of bones and scales can carry only limited information. Into the twelfth century, then, those literate Europeans who thought to write about the pike did so with emphasis on the predatory “water wolf.” The institutional and intellectual setting of the twelfth century, which yielded some of Hildegard of Bingen’s knowledge and in which Alexander Neckam worked, laid the foundations for modem scholarly and scientific traditions. Conscious use of knowledge about the predatory pike and its effect on populations of other species for managing domesticated fish production thus long antedated codification of this knowledge into intentionally composed manuals of fish culture. The flood of information released by the printing press allowed, even demanded, that knowledge become an ordered but open-ended accumulation of data for collaborative consideration and incremental change

Biology · Fish · Fishery · Pike · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories