Fabulous Ichthyophagoi: Fish-eaters and the (im)possibility of subsisting on fish flesh

By Dimitra Mylona

In the Archives of the Sea, ichthyophagoi, the fish-eaters, hold a place of prominence. We mentioned them on several occasions (see here and here).  In this post, we will dig deeper into their worlds. Did any people living exclusively on food from the sea ever exist?  When and where?  How did they manage to cope with the vagaries of the unpredictable, unseen and often daunting world of the sea and its creatures? Who saw them and told us about them?  Our sources, mythical, archaeological, historical, ethnographic and anthropological jointly tell us one thing: fish-eaters were made out to be the opposite of “us.” They were presented as strange, different, unsettling, and fascinating.  But more than anything else, they have been useful:  they helped “us”, the literate, non-maritime, elite, urban people (mostly men) of older times to define themselves in clear, easily understandable terms. 

This painting by Giuseppe Archimboldo, dated to 1566 is now kept at Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  If the phrase by French gastronome Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in 1826 “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”  has some truth to it, this portrait may be seen as illustrating a fish-eater, not unlike the ones we discuss in this post (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien ID: ad61ab1432).

In this post, we take a closer look into the evidence for the existence of the fish-eaters and also into the biases concerning the way they were perceived diachronically by foreign observers.  Eventually this exercise unveils the obvious: the actual ichthyophagoi of all times and everywhere in the world were not people without culture or with minimal culture. Instead, populations nourished from the sea were perfectly embedded in their world, physically, economically, and culturally!

Looking in the mirror and seeing the ichthyophagoi of the warm seas

In the 2^nd century CE Arrian, a Roman of Greek decent from Nikomedia in Asia Minor, spent his time as Roman aristocratic men did. He was a member of the Senate, a consul, and fought wars. At the same time, he was an intellectual and composed a number of extended works on many topics, taking his lead from famous older literary masterpieces.  Alexander the Great and his campaign in the East against the Persians was a constant source of inspiration to him. He wrote a history of Alexander’s expedition (Anabasis of Alexander), an account of the events after the famous conqueror’s death (Events after Alexander), and a narrative about the experiences of Nearchus of Crete, admiral of the Macedonian fleet, on the return journey from Indus Valley to the Persian Gulf (Indica).  Indica is of particular value, because it conveys Nearchus’s detailed, fascinating observations on the history, geography, and culture of the places he encountered. 

The map shows Alexander’s empire. Nearchus’ journey described by Arrian in Indica is shown as a dotted line from the Indus Delta to the Persian Gulf (map and caption George Willis Botsford, 1913. From A History of the Ancient World, The MacMillan Company and Wikipedia, @ Public Dommain).

Among these observations is an important and most eloquent description on the Ichthyophagoi, the fish-eaters of the Persian Gulf!

Nearchus’s encountered the fish-eaters often.  They were people who lived in small settlements and harbors along the coasts of Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. They lived off fishing, but they processed the fish they caught and traded them for pigs and other products of the land.  It is clear that most of them belonged to diversified communities.  In one of his asides, however, (XXIX, see the text below), Arrian gives us the picture of the pure ichtyhophagoi, those who really lived off the sea in the most extreme way.  They did so because, according to him, their land was extreme… barren and challenging.

This satellite image of the Persian Gulf and its surrounding lands illustrates the coastal landscape of the region in brown colors that we usually link to barrenness and dryness. This view from a high altitude, however, much like the impressions of ancient visitors in the area (originating from lusher homes), hide a reality that included areas of agricultural potential and productive oases.  More importantly, we can clearly see shallows, inlets, deep bays and coves, all ideal locations for fish and seafood (@ NASA and Public Domain).

The following excerpt is very specific, and it is all about the fish-eaters of the Persian Gulf.  Pay attention to Arrian’s reference to aspects of living that were familiar to Greeks and their world —fishing nets, cordage making, salt gathering, cultivation of plants, high and low social classes — but were not, supposedly, particularly significant among fish-eaters. Also pay attention to those aspects of living that were utterly foreign and strange —gathering fish without technology but rather by taking advantage of the tides, making flour out of fish instead of grain and making bread with it, having cattle but feeding it with fish instead of plant fodder, living on fish and shellfish alone, building houses with whale and fish bones. What a strange world the ichthyophagoi lived in! Arrian tried to make some sense of it. 

“These Ichthyophagoi subsist on what their name is derived from - fish. 

Yet, only a few of them fish out in the deep, for boats to do it with are scarce, and the art of fishing is unknown.  Generally speaking, they are indebted for their fish to the ebb-tide.  To take advantage of it, they make for themselves nets which are mostly two stadia in length.  These they weave from the bark of the palm-tree, twisting the fibers like flax. Now when sea retires from the land, the parts left dry are generally found to be without fish, while the hollows, which of course retain some water, swarm with them.  …..  

The more delicate kinds [of fish] they eat raw as soon as they are taken out of the water, but the large and coarser kinds they dry in the sun, and when sufficiently dried grind into a sort of flour, from which they make bread.  They bake also cakes from this flour.  The cattle, as well as the men, eat the dry fish, for there are no meadows in the country, nor grass at all.  But in many parts they fish also for crabs and oysters and mussels. ….. 

Some of the tribes inhabit desolate tracts which are so utterly sterile that they bear neither trees nor even wild fruits.  These poor wretches have nothing but fish to live on.  A few of them, however, sow some part of their land and use the produce to eat for zest along with their fish, which forms the staple of their diet. 

The better classes build houses of whale-bone, which they collect from the carcasses of whales cast ashore, and use instead of wood. The doors are formed of the broadest bones they can find. They poorer members, who form the great majority of the population, construct their houses with the backbones of fish.”

(Arrian, Indica, XXIX)

But his was one of a long list of works on the topic. Reading them, we get a clear idea of what the ichthyophagoi looked like in the eyes of the “civilized” Mediterranean educated men (see here).

The earliest of those authors known to us, is no other than Herodotus.  At the beginning of the Classical period, in the 5^th century BCE, he did not have to travel far to encounter some other fascinating fish-eaters. He only had to sail north in the Aegean and hit the Thracian coast, near one of the Greek colonies there, Abdera.  Abdera was a colony of Teos (a city in Asia Minor) established on the edge of a watery world of rivers, coastal lagoons, and rich seas, where the vast Thracian territory, both rich in wealth and mysterious, touched the sea.  Greeks thought that Thracians did many strange things. They ate dolphins for example, a clear taboo for Greeks, and they drank the blood of their animals for sustenance, an unthinkable act for Greeks, especially outside the realm of mysterious ritual.

A typical view of Vistonis lagoon today, where the limits between land and water are fluid, changing every season.  Such habitats are particularly rich in fish and other aquatic resources (@ tasosbmd)

There, in Lake Prasias (most probably the Vistonis Lagoon in present-day western Thrace, Greece) lived a people, who built their houses on piles in the water and kept their babies tied to a rope to make sure that they did not fall in the lake. They lived on the abundance of fish in the lake.  They only had to lower a basket to the water from a trap door on the floor of their huts. The basket would come up loaded with fish every time.  Fish were so abundant that the lake dwellers even fed them to their horses!

This short, out-of-focus film was shot by the Bulgarian occupation forces in the region of Vistonis Lagoon in 1943.    It documents the abundance of fish in the lagoon at the time.  Narration is in Bulgarian but sub-titles in Greek have been added by the Management Body of the National Park of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace (see here)

Although ancient Greek literature abounds in mentions of strange fish-related stories from the Greek world, fish-eaters did not feature in it again, until much later, from the 2^nd century BCE onward.  And by then, one could encounter such people only in faraway places, places where “civilization”, as Greek and Roman authors understood it, still did not have a strong hold. 

The first and most eloquent and detailed of the ancient descriptions of ichthyophagoi is by a geographer and historian of the 2^nd century BCE, Agatharchides from Cnidos.  We know very little about his life and his work has been lost, with the exception of some parts copied and reproduced by later writers. Especially the part about the fish-eaters of the Red Sea and Arabia from his work “On the Erythraean Sea” was copied by several renowned authors such as Diodorus of Sicily in the 1^st century BCE, Strabo, early in the 1^st c. AD, and even Byzantine Photius I in the 9^th century CE. (and a few others that will not be discussed in this post). The full description of the fish-eaters can be found here (as preserved by Diodorus Sicilus).  Notice how the familiar elements of civilized life that we read in Arrian’s description are underplayed even more in this early work. 

Roxani used this image of a fish-eater and the caption in a previous post (see here). It is from an 11th- or 12th-century hybrid manuscript that contains a text entitled Marvels of the East (in Latin with Old English translation) and illustrates exotic people of the east, presumably the Indian Ocean world, through the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon beholders that produced the work (British Library Cod. Cotton Tiberius B V, 80r. Image by Marten Kullman, flcker).

The fish-eaters, as Agatharchides understood them, were clearly humans but lacked many of the human traits that mark civilization.  They could not talk, they did not have any sense of propriety and social decorum, they only pursued bodily pleasure - the common features in "othering" stereotypes. They did not have technology, they subsisted only on fish and seafood, and they were able to make a living only because they were blessed with a sea that provided food in abundance!  Such an image of the far away, exotic, and so very primitive people, echoes, in some ways, the first impressions of Europeans that set food in small islands of the Pacific in the 16^th  and 17^th centuries. They encountered island societies, many of them with a distinct marine lifestyle, that looked idyllic, as if they represented the innocent childhood of civilization.

Fishing scene as an idyllic moment on Marianas Islands in north western Pacific, Colored lithograph titled "Marianas Islands" from H.R. Schinz, Naturgeschichte und Abbildung des Menschen, Zurich, 1845 (@ public domain)

Archaeology comes to provide some fascinating texture about the vibrant world of the fish-eaters of the warm seas, modifying or even invalidating some of the observations that fascinated the ancient authors.  Excavations at various sites in the Persian Gulf that range in date from prehistory to the historical era have located settlements with a distinct maritime character, where fishing and shellfish gathering, processing, and trade were part of their activities.  Using fish to make fertilizer for palm trees, and shells to make jewelry, beads, fish hooks, and kohl containers are among the distinct practices of their articulated maritime economy.

A fish hook made of shell from Akab, UAE (from Méry, S., Charpentier, V., & Beech, M. (2008). This constitutes some of the earliest evidence of shell fish‐hook technology in the Gulf.

Archaeology can even provide a glimpse of the life of individual fish-eaters.  Such evidence comes from an unlikely location.  DNA analysis of 136 human skeletons from the Middle Danube area, an important frontier in the Roman period, aimed to explore population movement and migration during the 1^st millennium CE.  Most of the individuals examined appear to have been of Anatolian ancestry during the Imperial period and of Central/Northern  European and Central Asian descent later on.  This sample also contained some outliers,  individuals who stood out as more exotic.  Such an individual, a adolescent male, was unearthed from Roman Viminacium, the Pirivoj cemetery, in Moesia Superior (present-day Serbia). He was buried with a clay lamp bearing unusual decoration (Jupiter-related iconography) and his DNA showed East African descent.  The most fascinating fact, however, comes from the isotopic analysis of one of his teeth, that was designed to show nutrition patterns throughout his life.  It seems that this young man, just out of childhood, grew up eating lots of marine foods somewhere on the sun-drenched shores of East Africa, and then somehow ended up on the Moesian Roman frontier!  Was he the child of some fish-eaters of East Africa who, by some strange turn of fate, met his death in rainy, chilly central Europe?

An East African teenager found at Viminacium cemetery (Serbia) was buried with a clay lamp that stood out as foreign and unusual. The isotopic analysis of a tooth showed that he grew up eating lots of marine foods.  In the graph in this image, this boy is marked with a red rectangle. His position on the square space of the graph indicates his early marine diet.  From Olalde et al.2023 (see bibliography).

What the Thracian ichthyophagoi and those of the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, and broader Indian Ocean had in common, despite their diverse geographical and cultural circumstances, is that they were all "marginal" communities, or they became known as such through descriptions like the ones we discussed here. 

A group of small stone fish storage structures of undefined date (top) and a fishers’ house (bottom) at Ra’s Sharbitat (Dhofar) at Oman (@P. Biagi, April 2026, from Biagi and Starnini 2020, see bibliography).

The ichthyophagoi of the cold seas

The theme of the bizarre fish-eaters retained its tantalizing qualities even centuries later, in the Byzantine Period (9^th century) and we find a description of them (that copied Agatharchides) in a collection of extracts and abridgements of 280 volumes of previous authors, known as Biblioteca or Myriobiblon by Photius I, a powerful church leader and intellectual of his time. One of those volumes, codex 250, is the work by Agatharchides on Ichthyophagoi! 

Myriobiblos in a 1601 copy on vellum

The Byzantines were not very adventurous.  They did not sail out to the unknown just to see what lay behind the horizon.  So, in the Byzantine literature we do not have many stories about exotic, strange, and bizarre lands and people, unless, like the stories by Agatharchides, they were found in older literature or told by visitors to Constantinople.  Yet, bizarrely enough, the fish-eaters pop up once again, in a Byzantine travel log by Laskaris Kananos of 1438-1439.  It is not very clear who Kananos was, but he certainly had trade interests that brought him to Scandinavia, and he even sailed to Iceland, known at the time by the ancient name Thule.  He described the inhabitants of that island as Ichthyophagoi!  Did the name reflect his classical education in travel literature and his familiarity with the classical authors, like Agatharchides, via Photius I?

In this excerpt from Olaus Magnus’ Carta Marina (the first map of Nordic countries to give details and place names, 1537), we see the island of Thule (Tile) with some of its landmarks.  It is interesting that the waters near it are shown as the home of whales (balena and orcha) and other monsters, all creatures familiar to mariners and fish-eaters! (@Public Domain).

The ichthyophagoi of Thule certainly did not fish in warm seas, but their maritime lifestyle along with that of many maritime populations in the north Atlantic over the last several centuries is well documented. Archaeological excavations of a small medieval village (11-13^th and 15-16th century CE, i.e. when Kananos visited Iceland) brought to light tiny turf structures and garbage heaps at Akurvík in north-west Iceland.   That region of Iceland is agriculturally marginal and people traditionally lived from fishing, sea mammal hunting, and fowling.  In medieval times, fishing was already aiming at processing and exportation of these products to the rest of Iceland and other Scandinavian countries.

A group of Copper Inuit catching fish near Bernard Harbor in Nunavut, Canada – 1916.  This method of fishing, using stone-built fish weirs and spears, was employed widely around the world, including in the Arctic Circle in the summer.  Photograph by G. H. Wilkins., Canadian Museum of History (see here).

Stanley Annanack guts freshly caught Arctic char near Kangiqsualujjuaq, Quebec, in August 1960 (@Rosemary Gilliat Eaton / Library and Archives Canada/e010975384).

At Akurvik in Iceland elements of the fish-eaters’ lifestyle, as we have encountered it in ancient literature, is evident everywhere.  The turf structures are light buildings with whale bones strategically placed at the corners to provide stability, and fish bones lie everywhere. Fish bones even line the floor of these rudimentary constructions, which have been interpreted as “fishing booths,” seasonally used habitation for fishers who practiced an early form of seasonal, specialized fishing.  In the table below, we can see how dominant marine foods were for the life of those fishers. Out of about 110.000 bones and shells that were collected during excavation, just about 2000 belong to terrestrial animals.  Everything else comes from the sea.  The remains include mostly fish and among them, gadids, i.e. cod and related species, are by far the most common. Marine mammals also appear to be a significant source of food, along with marine mollusks.  Akurvík was not the only such settlement on Iceland at the time. Archaeology alone has uncovered more than a dozen such places and contemporary written sources document even more!

This table describes the types of animals caught and eaten by the inhabitants of Akurvík.  Fish outnumber all others. Table from  Amundsen 2005 (see bibliography).

It thus seems that when Laskaris Kananos visited Iceland, he did not come across some primitive group of sea foragers, but rather met groups of specialized fish-eaters, already well incorporated in the modern interconnected world of long-distance commerce!  The name Ichtyophagoi (in the sense given to it by ancient authors) does not seem to fit the Thule fishers very well.

Tracing the roots of the ichthyophagoi in a world where the sea overwhelmed the land

For the ichthyophagoi to exist a sea teeming with fish and other seafood is necessary. Also crucial is a social and mental universe in which fish-eaters find a place for themselves.  Did such rich seas always exist on earth?  When did the fish-eaters first appeared in human history?  Where could they be found?

Looking for the historical roots of such specialized and unfamiliar (to modern westerners) people, such as the fish-eaters, one stumbles upon a serious road block.  That is the early modern historical, sociological and philosophical discourse and its impact on the way we understand history.   It passed down to us prejudices we do not even know that we have.  As the Icelandic cultural anthropologist Gisli Palsson puts it,

“With European exploration and the discoveries of new worlds from the 15^th century onwards, an ever increasing body of information regarding the different forms of human society was accumulated. Bewildered by the perplexity of available data and the problems they posed for their ethnocentric world-views, Europeans established typologies for classifying different societies and making sense of their variability. Somehow the new worlds had to be assimilated. Nineteenth century evolutionism deliberately addressed the problem, …” (Palson 1989, see bibliography).

In the 19^th century, evolutionism (in social sciences: the belief that human societies progress predictably from simple to complex stages) was predominant and fishing appeared as an important category of the “arts of subsistence” in those early evolutionary schemes.

A man from somewhere in the Micronesia is blowing on a triton shell some time at the end of 19^th or the beginning of the 20^th century (see here).

Without much need to substantiate their claims, 19th century thinkers like the American social theorist Lewis Henry Morgan and our more familiar figures of Friedrich Engels and Carl Marx, and many others after them, claimed that a livelihood based on fishing was first adopted early in human history (Morgan placed it at the Middle Stage of Savagery), sometime in the Palaeolithic, when social equality was a widespread phenomenon. According to this school of thought, primitive fishing represented an early stage of human development.  The key word here is “primitive”.  Leaving aside the implications of theses convictions for the way fishing communities around the world were studied, let us focus on the historical realities.

Artistic representation of Mesolithic shellfish gatherers at Orkney, Scotland, based on archaeological evidence (© Crown Copyright Historic Scotland reproduced courtesy of Historic Scotland, see here).

Yugan women and their dogs picking shellfish in the shallows (c) at Cape Horn, on the southern tip of Chile at the end of the 19^th century.  This repeated activity created huge shell middens (mounds of shell) all over their settlements (a and b). Photographs copied from León-Cristóbal 2026 (see bibliography), where one can find reference to their original source.

Archaeological research makes it clear. The first people to fully live off the sea and its resources (but also the rivers and their fish) emerged fairly recently, in the last 12.000 years!  The much earlier phenomenon of shellfish coastal foraging and the formation of huge shell-middens in places like South and East Africa is a different story that we may deal with in a separate post. The end of the 12^th millennium was the beginning of what is known in archaeological literature as the Mesolithic period, just before plant cultivation and animal husbandry became the defining modes of human subsistence.

In a dramatic, suggestive, set-up, Tuvalu's foreign minister, Simon Kofe, says his country is looking at ways to retain statehood even if their island disappears due to climate change and rising sea levels (@ Tuvalu Foreign Ministry/Reuters (see here).

The few millennia before the Mesolithic were a dramatic and memorable time in history when climate change had an immense impact.  The glaciers that covered huge expanses of the world melted and their waters run off into the seas, raising them by several dozen meters and filling them with sediments and nutrients.   Coastal plains were flooded and extensive wetlands developed.  Villages, hunting grounds, and familiar landmarks disappeared in the course of people’s lifetimes. Today we read about the bleak and very wet future of islands like Kiribati and Tuvalu in the Pacific and many coastal countries take measures to prevent the worst of the disasters the current sea level rise is bringing.  We do not know how people dealt with the conditions that prevailed as the sea was overwhelming the land when the last glacial period ended.  What we do know, however, is that back then the cataclysmic changes brought about new opportunities!

About 10.000 years ago, in many locations around the world, fisher camps appeared.  In caves or in settlements out in the open, people lived near the sea, fished intensively, collected mollusks from the shallows, and, moreover, they processed the fish they caught.  They stored them for consumption in the winter months when the sea was not accessible.  The same phenomenon appeared around the Mediterranean, in the Danube basin—the famous Iron Gates— in East Asia and the Japanese Archipelago, the Pacific Northwest of North America, and probably elsewhere too.

These maps show how the rising sea level shaped the land and island masses in the Aegean at two points in time, at 18.000 BP at the end of last glacial maximum and at 9.000 BP when rapid sea level rise approached its end.  Extensive former coastal planes were flooded and the distance between the mainland and the islands became longer.  People were forced to adapt. Maps from Van Andel, T. H., & Shackleton, J. C. (1982). Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic coastlines of Greece and the Aegean. Journal of field archaeology, 9(4), 445-454.

In the next part of this post we will zoom in on the eastern Mediterranean and especially on the Aegean Sea.  By the beginning of the Mesolithic, this period of rising sea level, the Aegean took its current form more or less.  Mountain tops became the Cycladic islands in the west and the Dodecanese and Sporades island groups to the east. At that time, a group of adventurous people reached the island of Yioura in the Sporades, which was shaped as the sea rose before their eyes.  They had boats to get there.  They arrived at Yioura and set up camp in a spacious and rather welcoming cave, what is known to us now as the Cave of the Cyclops. They set up hearths and made the cave their home.  For long periods every year, they would go down to the beach daily and fish.  Fish hooks and gorges made of bone and antler caught fish on the sea-bed and in the water column.  The fishers may have used nets made of plant fibbers too, but their traces have been lost over the millennia.  They may have had harpoons and arrows, made of flint and obsidian, rendering them lethal to the fish.

At Yioura and the Cave of the Cyclops, fishers made fish hooks using bone and antler.  Judging by their size, they were used to catch large fish of the kind documented from the fish bones found in the cave.  Notice how similar the basic shape of a fish hook is to modern equivalents (@ Moundrea-Agrafioti, 2003, see bibliography).

It must have been very rewarding and exciting to go fishing in the waters around Yioura back then. The sea was teeming with fish!  Excavations in the cave produced hundreds of thousands of fish bones and fish scales.  Also, some bones of marine mammals, many bird bones and tens of thousands of sea shells were recovered!  Bones of some mammals bear witness to a slightly diversified diet, but all in all, marine foods where what people were eating. They were as close as it gets to the ancient authors’ notion of the ichthyophagoi!

This photograph is a sample of large fish vertebrae from tunas, gray mullets and some other fish from the Cave of the Cyclops at Yioura (@Mylona, 2003, see bibliography).

The variety of fish caught by the inhabitants of Yioura is stunning. The size of the fish is large. Those fishers were not interested in the tiny fish that made up the typical catches in Prehistoric Aegean at later periods.  Fishers were catching fish, mostly mullets, in brackish waters, in coastal lagoons that existed around Yioura, even though it is rather hard to imagine it today looking at the rocky little island. They caught the perennial denizens of the shallows – saddled bream, auxiliary sea bream, common two-banded sea bream, common Pandora, scorpion fish, groupers, wrasses, moray eels, and many others.  These are fish that could be captured year round, weather permitting.  But, importantly, the fishers of Yioura were very interested in the migratory seasonal schooling fish.  Tunas, little tunas, albacore tunas, chub mackerels, Atlantic mackerels, and other similar creatures, which we have discussed extensively in a previous post (see here), were particularly desirable.

For certain kinds of fish, particularly the pelagics of the Scombridae family, with their abundant blood and fatty flesh, beheading, and gutting right after capture ensures that they do not spoil quickly.  They are often processed in this form (image from here).

The fish were caught and many were undoubtedly eaten on the spot, around the hearths that burned in the cave.  We find archaeological evidence of this.  Cut, chewed, and burned fish bones abound on the cave’s floor.  But those fish-eaters did something more important than that.  They processed the fish: they cut off the heads, especially of the fatty, rich in blood migratory species, they gutted them, and after preserving them (in a manner which remains unknown), they stored them in the cave.  Did the fish-eaters of Yioura keep the processed fish to eat in the cold stormy days of the winter?  Did they take the fish to their winter home somewhere else and shared them with their community?  Did they barter preserved fish for other things with communities who lived far from the sea?  So far we do not have the answers to such questions.

Articulated bones of large fish found stored in the floor of the semi-subterranean huts of the Mesolithic fishers at Maroulas, Kythnos (@ A. Sampson, in Mylona 2011, see bibliography).

The ichthyophagoi of Yioura were not alone in the Aegean.  On Kythnos island in the Cyclades another group of fishers lived on the coast, in semi-subterranean huts, and they were catching some really large, adult fish.  We found some of them kept under the floor (preserved and stored?).  Further south in the Argolid, another cave gave shelter to another group of Mesolithic fish-eaters.  The Franchthi cave was home to people since time immemorial.  It was used by hunters of deer and other large game during the last Glacial period when the sea had shrunk and the cold was bitter.  Their only systematic marine endeavors in those cold millennia were to collect particular sea shells, especially the dog whelk Tritia neritea /pellucid, that was good for necklaces! When the sea started rising, conquering the land, 11-12 millennia ago, people returned to the cave, but this time, they fished instead of hunting.  The rich fishing grounds of the Argolic Gulf had developed by then and the situation was comparable to that of Yioura island in the Sporades. 

This image shows a representative sample of pierced Tritia neritea /pellucid shells from late Palaeolithic strata in the cave of Franchthi.  These, and a few other species, were collected at the time (but also later in the Mesolithic) to be used as beads (from Perlès 2019, see bibliography).

Were there more fish-eaters in the region?  Probably so, but we have not excavated their settlements yet.  If we broaden our geographical horizon, we realize that this marine lifestyle was common. We find evidence for it in Croatia, in Italy, in the Black Sea, and on Cyprus.  The communities of people who lived off the sea, however, did not last long. They were eventually replaced, in most places, by farmers and shepherds who toiled on the land, and opted for the security brought by domestication and control of plants and animals.  The sea depths gradually became a very unfamiliar realm. 

Are the fish–eaters still around?

Nowadays the ichthyophagoi have all but disappeared.  Fish-eaters of the cold waters of the north, indigenous Inuit tribes in America, Europe and Asia are striving to keep alive just a few of their fishing activities, which have been emblematic for their cultures, including the very controversial practice of whale hunting. Whales are facing extinction after centuries of commercial hunting, and their killing is formally banned almost everywhere. For Inuit fish-eaters, the only way to keep whale hunting in their fishing universe is to turn it into an element of endangered cultural heritage and defend it as such.  The rest of their fishing activity is so closely linked to industrial fishing and to today’s tragically poor seas, that relying on it for making a living is getting more and more precarious. 

Whaling has been a part of Arctic cultures for thousands of years. Even today, both the Saqqaq and Eskimo (above, butchering a bowhead) are given an Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling quota by the International Whaling Commission. According to the most recent agreement, “the number of bowhead whales struck from the West Greenland shall not exceed 2” through 2018 (@ Emory Kristoff, National Geographic).

The nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes of fishers and divers of the southern oceans such as the Vezo people of Madagascar  (for a report on their current state and some wonderful photographs see here), and the Bajau who travel between  Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia (see here) to name just a few, find it increasingly hard to maintain their lifestyle as they become absorbed by coastal cities and their sedentary, urban lifestyles. 

Soa Nomeny lays out a salted catch of sardines to dry in the sun before being sold in Andavadoaka (@ Claudio Sieber, copied from here).

Tiny enclaves of fishing communities that preserve their close ties to the sea and its creatures are still found along the coasts all over the world, but their way of life and world views are more and more in need of protection.  In EU alone, thousands of research projects were funded between 2000-2025 to explore the character and protection possibilities of maritime cultural heritage, including tangible and intangible fishing cultural heritage and fishing communities (for the sources of this information see bibliography).  This need for protections speaks loudly of the danger faced by the fishing way of life of whole communities across Europe.  Similar initiatives elsewhere in the world document the same dire circumstances everywhere (for relevant agencies of global scope see bibliography).

This photograph is the work of Claudio Sieber, a photographic storyteller, who captured with his camera the vibrancy of the life of sea nomads Bajau.  In the breathtaking sea vistas and the smiling faces of his subjects, it becomes obvious that living off the sea is a matter of community relations among people and with the sea. We are thankful to Claudio Sieber for granting us permission to use his photograph here. (@ Claudio Sieber, see here).

The bleak conclusion of our excursion into the worlds of ichthyophagoi hides a glimmer of hope. The anthropologist from Iceland, Gisli Palson, gave us the clue.  The key to understanding and thus protecting fishing economies, and I would also say, fishing ways of life, is to see fishing not only as a series of technical acts within an ecological setting but as something embedded in social relations.  Social relations and our agency in forming them may be the crucial element that will preserve the diversity of life styles that created the richness of our culture.  The ichthyophagoi of the world are part of that culture!

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Do you want to cite this article? Here is how to do it:

Mylona, D. 2026. "Fabulous Ichthyophagoi: Fish-eaters and the (im)possibility of subsisting on fish flesh," Archives of the Sea, September 2026, https://www.archivesofthesea.com/en/post/fabulous-ichthyophagoi-fish-eaters-and-the-im-possibility-of-subsisting-on-fish-flesh