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Fish and seafood from Norje Sunnansund, Blekinge, southern Sweden

Mesolithic pit-fermented fish (Norje Sunnansund)

The oldest known evidence of fermentation is a pit at Norje Sunnansund in Sweden, about 9,200 years old, where large catches of roach were fermented without salt and stored for winter. How the fish were wrapped and covered is the excavators' reconstruction from the pit and its finds, not a recorded recipe.

Fully documentedFish and seafood

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedNo recipe survives. The list is the excavators' reconstruction of what went into the pit, from the bones and finds in it.
Roach (Rutilus rutilus)large catches; no amounts surviveRoach make up 79 % of the fish bones in the pit, against 22–56 % elsewhere on the site[boethius2021]
Pikeno amount recordedCaught in autumn as by-catch to the roach[boethius2021]
Pine bark and seal fatno amount recordedReconstruction; read as acidifiers[lund2016]
Seal and wild boar skinsno amount recordedReconstruction; the wrapping for the fish[lund2016]
StarterNo salt was used. Lund University's account is that the fish were acidified with pine bark and seal fat (the excavators' reconstruction, not a recorded recipe).
Start
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What changes: Starting material: roach caught as they gather in autumn

Step 1 of 4
Catch roach during the autumn migration
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented

Strontium isotopes in the teeth suggest most of the fermented cyprinids came in from the Baltic Sea coast in autumn, unlike the cyprinids found elsewhere on the site. Output: large catches of roach, with some pike.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

The oldest known evidence of fermentation is a pit at Norje Sunnansund in Sweden, about 9,200 years old, where large catches of roach were fermented without salt and stored for winter. How the fish were wrapped and covered is the excavators' reconstruction from the pit and its finds, not a recorded recipe. Salt is 0 % (Boethius A 2021).

Key numbers
Salt0 %Reported[boethius2021]Ferment without salt through the cold season

What makes this one different

It is fermented with no salt at all, which is why it had to be done in the cold season. Later Nordic fermented fish such as surströmming and rakfisk use salt.

Related ferments

Safety

This is a reconstruction of an ancient practice, not a recipe to follow. The authors note that fermenting fish without salt needs cold temperatures to keep harmful bacteria from growing. Cold alone is no guarantee. An Alaska health guide ties botulism there, mostly type E, to traditional foods aged in pits or containers, with salmon the fish most often involved. It says toxin is less likely at low temperatures, and one experiment found toxin in salmon heads aged in a sealed plastic container underground but not in a grass-lined pit. The FDA says type E can grow from 3.3 °C.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

The site dates to about 9,600–8,600 cal BP and was lived in all year, more in winter. To date 16,180 fish bone fragments have been identified, and the catch at the site is estimated at hundreds of tons. Lund University gives at least 60 tons of freshwater fish and about 30,000 fish bones per square metre in the layer. The find was first published by Boethius in 2016.

Microbes
No study we found names its microbes.
Process times
The sources we found give no figure for how long any of its steps take.
  1. [ak-guide] Alaska Division of Public Health, Section of Epidemiology 2011, Botulism in Alaska. A guide for physicians and health care providers, 2011 update (CDC Stacks copy)gov
  2. [fda-ch13] US Food and Drug Administration, Fish and Fishery Products Hazards and Controls Guidance, Chapter 13: Clostridium botulinum Toxin Formationgov
  3. [boethius2021] Boethius A., Kjällquist M., Kielman-Schmitt M., Ahlström T., Larsson L. 2021, Early Holocene Scandinavian foragers on a journey to affluence: Mesolithic fish exploitation, seasonal abundance and storage investigated through strontium isotope ratios by laser ablation (LA-MC-ICP-MS), PLoS ONE 16(1):e0245222paper
  4. [boethius2016] Boethius A. 2016, Something rotten in Scandinavia, the world's earliest evidence of fermentation, J. Archaeol. Sci. 66:169–180, doi:10.1016/j.jas.2016.01.008 (as cited in Boethius et al. 2021; not opened, the publisher's site blocks AI access)paper
  5. [lund2016] Lund University 2016, Signs of early settlement in the Nordic region date back to the cradle of civilisation (press release, 8 February 2016)web