The Black Sea in the Mediterranean economy.

Studies of trade between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean have traditionally been focused on the export of grain, slaves and processed fish. Grain exports from the Black Sea to Athens are frequently mentioned in the textual sources, as are slaves (e.g., the Scythians who served as a police force in Athens). The trade in fish products (salted fish and garum) is occasionally mentioned in the texts, but the archaeological evidence is somewhat self-contradictory. Extensive fish-salting installations have been excavated along the northern Black Sea coasts, but the numbers of amphorae associated with the finished product are negligible by comparison.This paper attempts to trace the dynamics of the Black Sea trade over time and proposes a model that is consistent with some of the apparent contradictions in our present evidence, taking the concept of “spheres of exchange”, as its point of departure. According to the model, the export of fish products from the Black Sea was not primarily driven by the Aegean demand for fish products, but by the demand for prestige goods such as oil and wine among the Pontic elite. Exports were needed to pay for imports, and to balance a decline in the export of slaves (and possibly other commodities as well) in the last century BCE and under the pax Romana, the volume of Pontic fish-salting had to be increased, regardless of its economic competivity.It is also proposed that fish products were not as a rule exported by Pontic merchants, but acquired at the production site by Aegean wholesalers, a business model not unlike the Italian mercanti di campagna of the 19th century. This would explain the scarcity of Pontic fish sauce amphorae in the archaeological record.

Black sea · Fish <Actinopterygii> · Marine fish · Mediterranean climate · Mediterranean sea · Prestige · Product (mathematics) · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Marine and environmental studies · Maritime and Coastal Archaeology