Oceans Past Platform

COST IS1403

Project acronym: OPP

Project: Oceans Past Platform

Chair: Poul Holm

Start date: 2014-11-17, End date: 2018-11-16

Objectives: The main aim of the Action proposal is to foster an interdisciplinary Integrative Platform to measure and understand the historical significance and value to European societies of living marine resource extraction (incl. fishing and mammal hunt) and production (incl. aquaculture) to help shape the future of coasts and oceans.

Abstract: The Action proposal, Oceans Past Platform (OPP), aims to measure and understand the significance and value to European societies of living marine resource extraction and production to help shape the future of coasts and oceans. The Integrative Platform will lower the barriers between human, social and natural sciences; multiply the learning capacity of research environments; and enable knowledge transfer and co-production among researchers and other societal actors, specifically by integrating historical findings of scale and intensity of resource use into management and policy frameworks. The oceans offer rich resources for feeding a hungry world. However, the sea is an alien space in a sense that the land is not. Fishing requires skills that must be learnt, it presupposes culinary preferences, technical ability, knowledge of target species, and a backdrop of material and intangible culture. OPP asks when, how and with what socioeconomic, political, cultural and ecological implications humans have impacted marine life, primarily in European seas in the last two millennia. The Action proposal calls on historians, archaeologists and social scientists as well as colleagues from the marine sciences to engage in dialogue and collaboration with ocean and coastal managers. OPP will develop historical descriptors and indicators for marine and coastal management.

Keywords: History and archaeology of living marine exploitation, aquaculture, socio-economics of coastal communities, ocean policy and management

Working Groups:

WG1 Trends in Production and Consumption

WG2 Coastal settlements

WG3 Aquaculture

WG4 Changing values (economic and cultural) of marine life to society

WG5 Gendered seas