Pickling Knowledge
The preservation of knowledge can be exceptionally
important and of great significance for some of the issues that we have
examined over the course of this module.
For instance, as we saw in chapter 6, our understanding
of modern day over-fishing has been enhanced dramatically through
archaeological studies of fish remains.
However, like cod, archaeological fish specialists are
also an endangered species – at present, only the University of Cambridge has
an academic fish specialist, Dr James Barrett. This means that only one person
is available to train a new generation in the skills that have proven so vital
for understanding fish stock.
In an endeavour to halt the growth of a skills gap, the
University of Nottingham led an initiative to develop a new digital resource…