Archaeological Fish-bone Images

The collection contains images of selected diagnostic anatomical elements from fish taxa commonly found on archaeological sites in the Sydney region, supplemented by taxa of the same family or genus from elsewhere where modern reference skeletons of Sydney taxa were not readily available. Scientific terminology and common names follow the Australian Museum Fish Site. Coding for taxa and anatomical parts were devised by Dr Sarah Colley as part of the Sydney Fish Project archaeological research project.

The taxonomy of modern specimens in the University of Sydney and Australian National University reference collections was copied from their current collection catalogues, with no attempt has made to verify their accuracy. Archaeological specimens were matched against examples available in the Australian National University and University of Sydney collections, which do not currently contain every possible fish taxon from the Sydney region. Where no exact match could be found the taxon has been classified as 'unknown'. Some identifications of archaeological specimens are tentative.

Digitisation was funded under the University of Sydney Faculty of Arts Research Support Scheme. Russell Workman photographed the physical specimens.

Supporting data tables for the Archaeological Fish-bone images can be found in Sydney eScholarship.