November 10, 2025
November 10, 2025
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Conference & Research Update
Conference & Research Update
Though the project only began in September it's been an incredibly busy first two months with a conference and data collection trip already ticked off the to-do list!
The International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ) working group for Archaeozoology, Genetics, Proteomics and Morphometrics (AGPM) held their 11th biennial meeting from October 14-17 to bring together researchers from across the globe to share their work in these rapidly growing fields.
The cover slide from Liz's 3-minute lightning talk about the project.
This year's conference was hosted by the University of Copenhagen's Globe Institute, a leader in interdisciplinary palaeoscience research, with keynotes from Jean-Denis Vigne, Eline Lorenzen, and Mary Prendergast. Project co-leads Liz Quinlan and Carly Ameen were both in attendance, with Carly sharing some geometric morphometrics results from her previous work on the Warhorse project and Liz giving a short lightning talk on the Beyond Stockfish project aims and participating in one of the poster sessions. The conference proved to be a great opportunity to discuss our planned research with other experts in palaeoproteomics and geometric morphometrics, with great feedback coming from those who viewed the poster. It was also an excellent source of insights into the most recent developments in the field, with exciting talks covering everything from dingo genetics and a shipwrecked sea turtle, to archaeological evidence for zoonotic diseases and long term human impacts on animal morphology.
A Coregeonus lavaretus, or common whitefish, specimen from the Copenhagen collections.
After the final keynote on integrating a human-centred approach to archaezoological research in Africa, the 2025 ICAZ AGPM conference came to a close but our project lead's data collection trip was just ramping up.
The first stop was Copenhagen itself, where Liz spent 4 days at the University of Copenhagen's zooarchaeological collections. This first round of data collection was focused on building a database of measurements from archaeologically important fish species in the Salmonidae, Cyprinidae and Mugilidae families. The goal is to collect measurements from up to 34 individual bones per individual fish skeleton, which will then be used to update and develop length-regression formulas-- similar to work done by Inge Jelu, Wim Wouters, Wim Van Neer and Els Thieren. These formulas can then be applied to archaeological fish bones to estimate length and weight of the fish when they were alive.
After Copenhagen the data collection trip continued with days spent measuring more at the Groningen Institute of Archaeology, the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed in Amersfoort, and the University of Amsterdam Zooarchaeology Lab. After a final stop in Paris at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle to plan out the next stage of data collection work with the new manager of their extensive icthyozooarchaeological collections.
After about nine full days of work at four different collections the database now contains measurements for 2532 bones from 92 individual specimens. Many of these bones had more than one measurement taken (after Morales & Rosenlund 1979), so the total number of individual measurements from this first stage of data collection comes in at just under seven thousand entires. With a target of at least 25 individuals per species, and 13 species total, this means that Liz may have taken as many as 20,000 measurements by the end of this project phase. That's a lot of podcast listening time!
The hope is that all this fiddly work will benefit not only other zooarchaeologists across northwestern Europe, but also be useful to researchers in ecology and other aquatic environmental sciences who may need to estimate fish size from partial or skeletal remains.
The view from the Amsterdam zooarchaeology lab, with the cleithra of two Cyprinus carpio, or European common carp, waiting to be measured and entered into the database.
The next phase of data collection will involve travel to zooarchaeological and natural history collections across England, and finally a return across the channel to hit locations in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Norway. We'll keep you updated on this and more, both here on our project blog and via Liz's LinkedIn and Bluesky feeds.
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