OPP Working Groups

Working group 1 - Fish Production

• Aim: to use archaeological, historical and more recent catch history information to establish integrated trends in exploitation of key marine species.
• Linking trends with technological development
• Linking trends with societal developments such as colonialism, past & present policy measures
• The role of marine science insights for production and consumption.

Summary Report

Working group 2 - Coastal settlements

• Aim: to pool and enhance existing knowledge regarding four critical issues that combines demographic, economic and environmental dimensions:
• Changing settlement engagements with dynamic coasts (e.g. when did people settle on or abandon coasts and for what reasons?).
• Changing regional specialisations of labour associated with trade and globalization.
• Changes in the scale and character of marine resource extraction and consumption.
• Changes to the chemistry of seas and marine fauna potentially influenced by coastal and riparian settlement.

Working group 3 - Aquaculture

• Aim: To collect and develop knowledge on aquaculture's impact on ecosystem goods and services and distribution of social and economic costs and benefits over time, as well as on the shifting perceptions and management of aquaculture, through examining the following issues:
• The different and changing production technologies and industrial structure of
  aquaculture production across time, industrial development phases and places by collating and exploring available archaeological and historical
  information to establish when and where the earliest development of the culture and enhancement of marine species took place
• The contribution and effects of different types of aquaculture on ecosystem goods and services over time (including provisioning, cultural and regulatory services (ref: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment)) and their societal repercussions.
• The different and changing social and economic impacts of aquaculture at different levels (individual, community, national, regional and international) and industrial phases.
• The costs and benefits of aquaculture production, and people- and context-specific social framing conditions that go into planning and policy review of aquaculture production.

Working group 4 - Changing Values

• Aim: By documenting the changing relationship of society and marine life to develop a comparative trans-disciplinary and integrative understanding of the human-ocean system and overall changes in society, focusing on:
• the long-term interaction of humans and marine life in medieval and modern Europe (also in comparison to modern African case-studies).
• how natural populations of marine mega fauna and their ecosystems changed across the centuries to the present day.
• how humans changed their activities (both in terms of target species and maritime activities of exploitation) and values and perceptions accordingly

Working group 5 - Gendered Seas

• Aim: To understand how men and women have used, governed, and changed their marine environment over time
• evaluate different roles, responsibilities, access and opportunities of men and women in marine resource use
• analyse the knowledge of, access to, and use of, fish and other marine resources, differentiated between women and men.

Working Group Workshops 2015