The Great Auk and Big Fish on the Isle of Portland
The great auk was a flightless species of bird that inhabited the Northern Atlantic until its extinction in the nineteenth century. This species spent much of its time at sea apart from in the breeding season when the birds nested on coasts and particularly islands on either side of the Atlantic. Finds of bones of this species from archaeological site in Britain are rare and are mainly restricted to northern Scotland, although isolated finds have been found on a Roman site in the Scillies and a post-medieval site on the Isle of Man. It was therefore exciting to discover in 2007 several bones of great auk in a Roman assemblage from the Isle of Portland in Dorset. This is the first discovery of this species along the South coast and extends the known range of this species at that time. The Isle of Portland would have provided suitable nesting sites for the great auk and indeed there is evidence from the site that other seabirds were also been occasionally caught. Moreover cut marks were found on one of the great auk bones providing clear evidence that this bird was butchered for its meat.
The analysis of the assemblage from this site also produced evidence for the presence of several species of sea bream, bass and some very large cod – some of these fish are not those commonly caught around Portland today. The analysis has indicated that these fish were probably all caught locally and the assemblage has provided one of the richest fish bone assemblages discovered at a Romano-British site.
