Tonnare antiche

Traditional modern tunny-fishing factory (i.e. tonnara, madrague, almadraba etc.) isn’t an Arabian or Byzantine invention, but it comes from ancient Greek-Roman culture. A factory for fishing and salting tuna, lately surveyed near Pachino (Siracusa, Italia), is the material evidence of that; furthermore, several epigraphic and literary soruces confirm that in antiquity tunny-fishing was carried out not only with encircling nets, ma also with anchored and moored tunny-fishing nets, as modern tonnare was. The sources call that with some technical terms (depending on the fish size): pelamydeia, thynneia, orkyneia, keteia, and furthermore with the byzantine term epoche and latin cetaria. Elements of such system was the thynnoskopeia (sighting points), and ketothereia (layings up for fishing tools).