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Mediterranean Sea in order to spawn, has ensured an abundance of tuna each year in April

and May. For millennia coastal communities have taken advantage of, and come to depend

on, the migration. Mediterranean fish exporting communities depended largely on tuna since

tuna fisheries were the most significant of all the fisheries. The meat would be smoked and

dried and then wrapped in a fig leaf and placed in a pottery jar for shipment across the

Mediterranean (Roeseti 1966, p. 83). Cargoes of salted tuna were even sent as far as the

medieval Parisian courts (Toussaint-Samat 2006, p. 317). So important was tuna for the

economy that the provinces of Istria and Rome would strike a coin with the design of a head

or body of tuna (Toussaint-Samat 2006, p. 84). Tuna still appears on a coin in Istria today.

Technology and systems for tuna fishing in the Mediterranean evolved alongside knowledge

of tuna biology, behaviour, and oceanographic and climatic conditions (Sarà 1980; Longo &

Clark 2012; Roeseti 1966). Fishers utilised a variety of gear – pole and line, beach seines,

harpoons, trolls (Roeseti 1966; Longo & Clark 2012). By far the most documented and long

standing method is the trap. The Phoenicians invented a deep water trap using palm tree

branches planted in the sandy sea floor and killed the tuna by club or spear (Sarà 1980, p.

nd
129). In the 2 century AD Oppian described a trap system in his book of poems on fishing,
Halieutica:

...the nets are set forth in the waves like a city, and the net has its gate-warders and
gates withal and inner courts. And swiftly the Tunnies speed on in line, like ranks
of men marching tribe by tribe...they pour within the nets, so long as they desire
and as the net can receive the throng of them... (rev. the Loeb Classical Library
1928, p. 401)

Oppian’s description predates what becomes to be known as la tonnara in Italian.

th
Most scholars agree that it was not until Arab control of Sicily in the 9-11 century AD that

the tonnare were established (Longo 2012, p. 208). During this period, fishing terminology,

labour practices, customs, organisation and technical specifications emerged, and have

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