There is evidence of specialized fishing adaptations in the archaeological record dating from Paleolithic times, which parallel technological developments in the exploitation of terrestrial resources. Fishery resources are in places abundant and reliable. Year-round livelihoods are possible with minimum technical elaboration. Shellfish may be picked off the rocks at low tide, artificial pools built of rocks to trap fish as the tide flows out; streams and rivers may be dammed with sticks and stones. Middens at coastal, riverine and lacustrine sites demonstrate long, continuous occupation with strata of shells and fish bones several metres deep.
A fishing economy may be supported either by simple gathering, active hunting, or both. Fishing may be a full-time specialization, or it may be a seasonal, part-time or occasional pursuit. It may rely upon sedentary or slow-moving animals which are easily gathered; it may exploit locally-resident populations of fish and sea mammals which require more active techniques of trapping or hunting; or it may pursue seasonal migrations of these animals with a variety of technical means, including boats operating offshore, out of sight of land. Depending upon the nature of the resources exploited, and the technical basis of the economy, relatively dense populations of people can be supported, since the †carrying capacity of the immediate environment is not limited by the natural distribution of terrestrial plants and animals, as in a *hunting and gathering economy.
The Kwakiutl, Nootka, Tsimshian and other peoples of the west coast of Canada give examples of pre-industrial maritime economies founded upon sea-mammal hunting and the seasonal capture of salmon and candlefish. Much of their food supply was garnered during a relatively short season; preserved fish was the staple foodstuff for the rest of the year, which left ample time for other activities. These peoples were largely sedentary, living in large, permanent, year-round village communities. Elsewhere, there are †Mesolithic and †Neolithic sites which suggest similar features, and have given rise to speculation that maritime peoples, having stable food supplies, adequate leisure and sedentary settlement patterns, were more favourably placed to experiment with domestication and cultivation at lower risk and opportunity costs than nomadic or *transhumant populations reliant upon terrestrial resources only.
There is uncertainty, therefore, whether fishing should be classified as a sub-type of hunting and gathering, or as a distinct mode of livelihood, intermediate between hunting and gathering and horticulture. While fishing economies rely upon wild resources which are hunted or collected, social complexity of a kind normally associated with domesticated resources is demonstrated in the archaeological and ethnographic records. The classical theorists, upon whom contemporary anthropologists rely for authority, evidently knew little about fishing, or found the anomalies methodologically too troublesome to be fitted into their schemes. For example, *Morgan treated fishing as identical with hunting and gathering; and †Marx did not mention fishing at all, a circumstance which has given rise to difficulties in anthropologists’ attempts to devise analyses of fishing economies using Marxist principles.
Attempts to theorize fishing have had mixed success. One concept that has proved useful in explaining certain kinds of fishing that involve active hunting is the ‘tragedy of the commons’. If the fish in the sea are a common resource, over which no one is able to assert a proprietorial claim, then the tendency will be for the numbers of fishers to expand and for all to take as much as they can until the catches available to each decline below the point of economic viability. At this point, some or all of the fishers drop out. Gradually numbers build up again and the cycle repeats itself. In practice, however, fishers may seek to counter declining catches with improved forms of organization and technical equipment. Ultimately, the fish may be caught faster than they can reproduce themselves, leading to the complete collapse of the fish populations upon which the fishers depend. There have been several such collapses in recent years. Anthropologists have played a significant role in identifying the social and economic variables leading to instances of over-exploitation in modern commercial fisheries, and their advice has been sought by national and international agencies seeking to create new regulatory frameworks.
In other respects, a ‘theory of fishing’ remains elusive. People like the Nuer of the Southern Sudan, who spear fish during a brief season in years when the Nile floods, are fishers only as occasional opportunists; they have little in common with the Nootka, still less with contemporary Norwegian trawler operators and crews. Nevertheless, maritime anthropologists have attempted to apply the label †‘petty commodity producers’ or ‘artisanal fishers’ to a wide variety of modern fishing peoples with little apparent regard for the local origins of fishing or its relationship to *capitalism. In some places, it may indeed be a semi-subsistence *peasant activity; in other places fishing can be adequately understood only in relation to the rise of mercantilism and industrial capitalism, and where the fishers themselves are no less capitalists and industrial workers than city dwellers. Comparative research on the differential penetration of *markets in fish, capital and labour at various periods and in various places still requires to be done if an adequate ‘theory of fishing’ is to be advanced.
