Introduction: Why revisit data on Black Sea Fishing activities during Classical Antiquity?

The present volume contains the proceedings of the conference Fishing and Greek Colonisation in the Black Sea during Antiquity. A geographical and regional approach, held at Aix-en-Provence, in the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme on 3th-4th June 2021. This event was organised on behalf of the Centre Camille Jullian (UMR 7299, CNRS-Aix-Marseille University) and the musée du Louvre (Paris).Since 1999, the Centre Camille Jullian has studied and conducted research on fishing and the processing of its products in the western Mediterranean during protohistoric and ancient periods (see for instance Stern-berg, 1995, 1999, 2000, 2007, 2019; Botte, 2009; Faget & Sternberg, 2015). More recently, this work has been extended to the Atlantic coast (Ephrem, 2014). At the same time, two joint-archaeological Missions in Bulgaria (Apollonia Pontica) and Romania (Orgame), part of a research programme devoted to the Black Sea (PI Alexandre Baralis), have led to precious and fruitful collaborations. Successively funded by the French National Research Agency (“Pont-Euxin”, grant No. ANR-09-RPDOC-021-01), the French Ministry of European and Foreign Affairs and the musée du Louvre, these excavations have contributed to bring the Pontic area into questions concerning the exploitation of ancient marine resources (Baralis & Lungu, 2015, 2021; Baralis & Panayotova, 2015; Baralis et al., 2016).The editors of this volume are deeply grateful to the successive directors of the Centre Camille Jullian – Jean-Christophe Sourisseau and Giulia Boetto –, of the Louvre Museum – Jean-Luc Martinez and Laurence Des Cars – and of the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities – Françoise Gaultier and Cécile Giroire. The conference was originally scheduled for March 2020, but, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was postponed to June 2021. In these particularly difficult circumstances, both our institutions and colleagues always found solutions to the obstacles encountered.