Sabratha Fish-Salting Workshops

About

Eighteen fish-salting workshops lined Sabratha's shoreline, their 49 vats scaled for neighborhood trade rather than export on the scale of Baetica's mega-factories. Workers packed sardines and mackerel between layers of salt inside masonry tanks averaging two cubic meters, yielding an estimated 16,000 amphorae of salted fish and garum a year. The cramped layout, with barely room for anything but the vats themselves, closely mirrors small household-scale garum operations recently found at Pompeii. Fishing income here supplemented the olive oil that made Sabratha rich.

What happened here

Rows of stone vats sunk into the ground beside the sea, and the smell reaches a long way inland. Small fish and the guts of larger ones are layered with salt and left in the sun for weeks; the liquid that separates off is drawn away as fish sauce and the residue is sold cheaply as paste. Grades run from a luxury sauce that costs more than good wine down to the version bought by everyone else. Tunny is netted in season from lookout towers on the headland, and the fishing, salting, potting and shipping all happen within a few hundred metres. Amphorae are stamped with the maker's name. Towns built on this are rich, and they are built downwind of themselves.

Sources

• Wilson, A. 'Fish-salting workshops in Sabratha', academia.edu
• 'Commerce and Industry in Roman Sabratha', Libyan Studies (Cambridge)

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Theatre of Sabratha

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Temple of Liber Pater

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Capitolium of Sabratha

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