Weir Fishing in Focus

Some Ancient Technologies last until the present day and Weir Fishing is one of them. Fascinated by the dimensions of an archaeological find of a fishing weir, photographer and filmmaker Frank Wiersema decided to make a film about this phenomenon. Frank chats with host Noah Melton about the multi-pronged approach he took to making the film. Challenges he encountered ranged from the complexity of replicating a fishing weir as a museum display in Swifterkamp open-air museum, to considerations regarding the type of actors to cast and diversity and inclusion in the reenactment community in general. 

This conversation was recorded on June 24th. The film has been released in the meantime.

Transcript

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You're listening to the EXARC Show run by EXARC, the International Society for Experimental Archaeology, Open-Air Museums, Ancient and Traditional Technology and Heritage Interpretation.   

Noah:  Welcome to The EXARC Show. My name is Noah Melton, and today I will be talking to Frank Wiersema. He's a professional photographer and filmmaker and is engaged in experimental archaeology here at the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University. Today we'll be discussing his new film, which looks at the topic of archaeology and heritage through the subject of fishing weirs in prehistory and contemporary society. How's it going?

Frank: Yeah, great. Thanks for having me as a guest on your podcast. 

Noah: Great to have you here. So first of all, can we just explain to the viewers at home: what is a fishing weir? 

Frank: Yeah, let's get that out of the way first. It's basically a fish trap, and a specific one. Works really well with tidal action, or at least with moving water. So imagine an estuary or a river or any body of water and a large row of poles in it. When you place a row of poles in water, then fish… they're not the bravest of animals. They don't dare to swim in between poles, so they'll stay on their side of the row of poles. When you make the row go in a V shape, then that kind of guides the fishies in the point of the V shape. And there you can have, for instance, your funnel or your specific trap and collect the fish out of there. That is a very nifty construction. It functions very well, and people already back in the Mesolithic, so 6,000 years back, that's when they already found out that that works well. It worked so well that it was a really ubiquitous way of catching fish all through history, up to the present day even. Although there's only one fishery left on earth that still fishes in this manner and they also announced that they'll stop. It's really a traditional method of trapping fish that goes back a long way, and it is sadly coming to an end now, so hence me making a movie about it. 

Noah: That's of course why we have you on here. But first let's take a step back. You're a professional photographer by trade. How long have you been applying these skills to the realm of reenactment, archaeology and history? And what inspired you in the first place to get into these things? 

Frank: I did the photo academy, finished that in 2010 or '11, thereabouts. I was trained more in a commercial type of way. But the world of advertisement and stuff, I don't speak that language. So I very quickly found out that that's not where I should have my career. And then I was like, yeah, what would I do then? I've always been passionate about anything to do with history and archaeology, so I figured let's apply my type of production on these subject matters, and that's how I started working for museums and institutions like that. And then in corona times, a good client, Museum Vrolik, the anatomy museum of the University of Amsterdam, was like, "Oh, let's start a YouTube channel." And that's how I then started filming to expand my toolkit a little bit. And, yeah, filming is fun, so I make pictures and moving images nowadays. 

Noah: Nice. Also, for the viewers at home, if you'd like to see any of his work, it's all available on his gallery, i's a website. From looking at the gallery on your website, what you can see there is a large focus on the Bronze Age, the Neolithic, also the Iron Age. Is that just the sort of work that came to you, or do you also have a preference for these periods over later ones? 

Frank: Yeah, the latter very much so. I'm quite passionate about prehistory. When I started especially, I felt that it was very much underrepresented. You see a lot of Roman reenactment, for instance, but I don't like that time period personally very much, matter of personal interest. And then when you start working in that niche, then that gets picked up on, and then you become the guy who does recreations of prehistoric life. So that comes from my personal preference indeed. 

Noah: Cool. Again, viewers at home, please take a look at these pictures. These are the kinds of pictures where you can just stare at them for minutes on end. I've just found myself doing that at home. They're really well composed, and it's just… the lighting, I can't really describe it. It's very good. 

Frank: Glad to hear that. Especially nowadays in a time that people don't look at pictures too long anymore because people are flooded with pictures and scroll through them fairly quickly. My aim is to make pictures that you can look at a little bit longer. Lots of detail in there, lots of storytelling. So yeah, glad that that comes out. Thanks. 

Noah: Also, it's quite important to note how you're doing these really photorealistic recreations through photography, in a time where it's sadly becoming quite common for even some actual proper archaeological journals to post AI recreations of historical scenes. So it's quite good to see someone still out here making the proper photos. Since you've gotten into all this work, you've ended up here at the Faculty of Archaeology in Leiden, what kind of work have you been doing here? 

Frank: Yeah, as a little side quest I decided, why not, pursue a master degree in archaeology. So I'm studying now, also experimental archaeology. That's what my thesis is about. And then when I'm here anyway, I felt like why not start a club on experimental archaeology, the Work Group Experimental Archaeology Leiden. The Work Group Experimental Archaeology Groningen already existed, founded by Groningen students. Yeah, just to get kids to play outside more and also to give a voice to the fact that from the students out there's still a lot of enthusiasm for experimental archaeology. We've been doing fun projects in the open-air museum Swifterkamp and I hope to continue doing that after I've finished my degree here. This film is also part of a project that I also got the Work Group Experimental Archaeology Leiden involved in. That means that, not only am I making a film about these fish traps, the fish weirs, but we've also been making a replica of one of these fish weirs in the waters around Swifterkamp. I got the students from this Work Group to help out make this recreation and see how it's done. It's still standing proud in the waters surrounding Swifterkamp. The film will then also be part of explaining how a fish weir actually functions. So it'll be a nice little extra museum display. Fishing in general was hugely important in prehistory, and you hardly ever see it represented in open-air museums at all. I found that that was a bit of a shame, and the director of the museum also found that that was a bit of a shame. So that's why we started then this project to give that a bit more attention. 

Noah: How was that experience, building the fishing weir yourself with the other members of the working group from Leiden? 

Frank: That was great fun and also very interesting from an experimental archaeologist point of view. Well, I say experimental archaeology, but we did not formulate research questions on forehand, so it was more experiential rather than that. But actually the practicalities of getting poles into water and creating a huge construction like that, you come across certain challenges when you start trying it out. We used augers to try and make holes underwater, that didn't work at all, and then just ramming these poles in with a huge sledgehammer seems to kind of work. Then I went to Bergen op Zoom to see how the actual professional fishers do it. They use this pressure hose kind of thing to make big holes to get the poles in. So yeah, that would have been a challenge because the fishing weirs in prehistory could stretch for hundreds of meters, a row of poles of hundreds of meters. That must have been quite a challenge to get that done. I still don't really have a good answer as to how they would have done that. That's an interesting research question for future experimental archaeological research. 

Noah: Absolutely, yes. That kind of slides us into the film. Part of the basis for your film was the discovery of this 420-meter-long fishing weir, was it? 

Frank: What is being dug up was 420 meters, but that was only the extent of the excavation, so they didn't really find the end, so it was probably even bigger. They probably fenced off an entire estuary with that. It was quite an infrastructure. 

Noah: That is quite insane. So this was the inspiration and you ended up making this film. How was the experience shooting? 

Frank: That was quite interesting indeed. Basically it started when I visited this conference-type… a yearly event from the Rijksmuseum of Antiquities, the RMO, the Steentijddag, the Stone Age day, when archaeologist Silke Lange did a presentation on the work that she did as a wood specialist on these fishing weirs, and I was completely gobsmacked by how insane this whole infrastructure is. I was there with another volunteer from Swifterkamp, Marjolein... I forgot her surname. We felt like, oh, we need to bring this to Swifterkamp. And one thing led to another, and before you know it, I started this crazy project. Then I heard that there's still one fishery in the Netherlands, or in the world basically but that's founded in the Netherlands, that still uses this type of fish trap. So I felt like, oh, I need to film them before it's too late. So I called them on the phone. That was not last summer, but the summer before. I just called them on the phone like, "Hey, can I film you guys?" And then the lady on the phone said “Yeah, you would have been welcome to, but the fishing season is already over. So two weeks ago, we already pulled in our nets." And I was like, "Okay, so this is great." Like, I want to film a 6,000-year-old tradition and I'm two weeks late, that's just my luck. But luckily they didn't stop just yet, so they had another season, so I filmed them the year after. My background is, of course, in recreating what life might have looked like in the past, so doing these reenactment-type scenes was something that I had by then already started doing, specifically on these fish traps, how they function and then to link that to the contemporary fishers in Bergen op Zoom, it was really interesting to put those things together. 

Noah: You mention these fishermen, how they're the last ones practicing the fish weiring practice. I was wondering, are you also doing any sort of benefits for them, since I believe in the film they say this is one of the last seasons they might ever have to conduct? 

Frank: I don't know for a fact if that might be a bit of an overstatement. The fishermen themselves, they simply don't catch any anchovies anymore. That's the type of fish that they fish on, so then it makes no sense to continue this practice. But there is an organization, a volunteer organization, Stichting Behoud Weervisserij, they want to preserve this practice, so they organize trips that people can book to see the fishermen in action. And that is what brings in money, and makes it possible for them to continue this practice. What I really hope is that this film also might give them a little bit more exposure so that people keep booking these trips. It's really great fun. I mean, it's just a day out on the boat, and you see one of the very last practitioners of an ancient craft right in front of you. That's great, I can highly recommend anyone to book one of these trips. I hope that they can, through that, continue this ancient practice. 

Noah: Not only are you working in the heritage aspect within the film itself, but it's nice that through this work you can even benefit them directly, hopefully through our audience. 

Frank: Yeah. I'm sure you'll put a link to where you can book one of these trips in the description. 

Noah: Yes, we'll put that there. So to go over the rough outline of the film. The vast majority of the film has commentary about the tradition of using fishing weirs by three specialists, whose names are...? 

Frank: We have Daan Raemaekers, a professor at Groningen University, who is specialized in prehistory of the Netherlands, specifically also the Swifterbant culture. And then we have Silke Lange, a wood specialist, who did the research on the wood of the fish weirs in this specific archaeological find. She's just such a joy to listen to. And then we have Peter Vos. He is a geologist and he authored the Atlas of the Holocene Netherlands. He basically reconstructed how the landscape changed over the course of the Holocene, and it changed quite dramatically. So that's very relevant to where these fish weirs were located in the past in the Neolithic, because that's the type of landscape that you see nowadays in Bergen op Zoom and the Oosterschelde, where the contemporary fish traps are. So that makes it really logical that you dig them up in Flevoland, but you still see them today in Bergen op Zoom. And then, of course, I interviewed the fishermen themselves as well. 

Noah: So yes, the first half of the film more or less is the reconstruction of people using the ancient fishing weirs, processing fish, doing all sorts of daily tasks and then the latter half is going into that last fishery in Bergen op Zoom. I find it really interesting how you have three different aspects combining in the film. You have the informative aspect. You have the specialists talking and it's very interesting - as an archaeologist myself, it's very interesting to listen to. Then you have the heritage aspect with the modern-day fishermen, which is of course great, like you would see in most documentaries. Then you have the modern-day aspect with the modern fishermen, which is more of a heritage type of thing, another very important aspect of archaeology, of course. But then with the reconstructions, I figure you could also say you have a bit of art in there…

Frank: That's probably indeed my background as a photographer, that I like the visually appealing as well. I think it's important also to make it engaging for the viewers. Archaeology can be a bit dry when you just read reports, but when you want to communicate a grand narrative, it's good to just recreate also a visual of what life might have looked like in the past to make it engaging to the audience. 

Noah: I'd agree that's quite important. I think it works quite well in the film. It all blends in very smoothly. It doesn't dumb anything down for the audience, but it does make it entertaining at the same time. I was wondering also about the way you've set it out. Does it have to do with your opinions about how science communication should be carried out? 

Frank: Yes. I'm obviously passionate about archaeology and we don't only do that for our own bubble. So I think it's important to engage the general public as well. We cannot understate the importance of preserving our heritage. So that was indeed one of the missions for this film to not only basically show and document the heritage, but also make the point that it's important to preserve that. And I'm doing that mainly from the archaeologist point of view. Both Silke Lange and Daan Raemakers confirm that. Silke, as a wood specialist, really acknowledges that it's of invaluable importance to have specialists around craftsmen. Daan Raemakers is a bit more careful in his statements, but he does acknowledge the fact that looking at these modern-day fishers explains how fish traps are used today, and that that definitely can be an inspiration for archaeologists to interpret how it might have been in the past. 

Noah: It's very much something of great importance in the modern day. I think a lot of archaeologists are becoming more and more aware of that, how careful we need to be with our heritage and how much respect we should put on it. I also heard that you were able to get some public funding for this project? 

Frank: That's right. When I pitched this idea with the guy who runs Swifterkamp, Martin Vlot, he was quite enthusiastic to do something about fishing. That's how we came up with this project to both make a film about it but also a museum display. And that's how we got both the Cultuurfonds engaged and also the Province of Flevoland to back this up with a little bit of funding. So we're very thankful for that, shoutout to them. 

Noah: It's very nice that you were able to get interest from public bodies there, and good that they also see how important this sort of work is. Going back a bit to the details of the film, of course, whenever you're doing prehistoric reconstruction, there's gonna be a lot of questions about casting, whether that be in photos or artistic renditions and, of course, in filmography. So was this important to you also in your decisions for the casting of the movie? Because of course you have to deal with A, the way people look, and then B, the sort of skills they know. How exactly did you go about the casting then? 

Frank: This is for me a very important thing to do it right. Ideally you would want to work with reenactors who are familiar with the topic so that they know how to actually get into the role of someone from the past, because they've been engaged with that and have the tools and the clothes, et cetera. But we now also know from recent DNA research what kind of DNA people in the past had, which implies what they looked like. And then we come across a very tricky issue, namely that reenactment, especially in Northwest Europe, in the Netherlands, is very much a hobby of Caucasian people. 

We now know that the genome from, especially hunter-gatherers, does not really exist anymore, or maybe in trace amounts in the contemporary population. So it is not possible to cast someone with the exact looks that people had back then. We know from osteology a little bit what kind of features people had, and we have a good estimate of the skin tone. But I did want to make the point that people don't look the way that traditionally stereotypical Dutch people are being perceived, as white and blonde. I consulted, of course, with specialists also from the faculty and from the world of archeology, who also acknowledge the fact that we can only make a rough estimate of what people looked like. So the decision that I made is to make them at least not look Caucasian, because we know that that is wrong. We know people had probably a dark skin tone. So I basically looked at a wide range of people with darker skin tones. 

Recently a paper came out that in the early Neolithic, in the time period that my movie is about, that there was still quite a lot of hunter-gatherer DNA persisting in the Rhine-Meuse Delta, with some Anatolian DNA already coming in. So some people had a lot of Western hunter-gatherer DNA, some people had Anatolian DNA. I ended up casting a wide range of people, ranging from people with, for example, more of a Surinam descent, because they don't look specifically what we associate with African, because we know that that's a different gene pool altogether, with a dark skin tone, ranging all the way to people with a light to dark skin tone with more Anatolian looks, for example, from Türkiye or Greek. And people from, for example, India with much different facial features, but still a darker skin tone to have as wide a range as possible, to highlight the fact that we need to keep an open mind as to the range of features that we should include in recreations like this.

What I ended up doing is casting people who looked the part and who were interested in helping out with this movie, of course, and then getting all the clothes and the gear and the stuff from people from my circle of friends in reenactment. So I had people help out with the styling, meaning that I got all these personal clothes of people that each had a unique touch to them, and then dressed my cast up with these items so that they all had a certain touch to their outfits, and that really helped also getting them into the role of a prehistoric person. I had both people who looked the part and were dressed the part and then because, yeah, of course, when you are directing a film, then you need to direct it proper anyway. So then it doesn't really matter that much that the people were not that much into reenactment themselves if you, as a director, kinda know what you're doing. That's how I went about that. 

Noah: The methodology by which you went through this was quite solid, I'd say. It sounds  like you made a pretty good choice given the way that reenactment is in the country and the needs for proper representation in the film. 

Frank: Yeah, indeed. And if I might sidetrack a little bit, I think that this proper representation is important in and of itself, but I also believe that it can be a really great tool for a more inclusive reenactment scene in general. Of course, when I put photos out there of, for instance, Mesolithic hunter-gatherers or Neolithic people with a darker skin tone, you do get some pushback from the general audience. There is, sadly enough, still some institutionalized racism in Northwest Europe, in my country, the Netherlands, in particular. And it's understandable that when you get into reenactment you are engaging with the past on a very personal level because you're putting yourself into their shoes, basically, and you want to feel a certain connection with the past that you are reenacting. Traditionally, before these DNA researches came out, it's easier to reenact the place where you feel a connection with, which is the place where you were born and raised. Well, I mean, there is a problematic part of Dutch history in general that has to do with colonialism and slave trade. So when you are a person of a background that's more from, for instance, like Indonesian, African, or that makes you have a darker skin tone, then it makes sense that you're not interested in reenacting the past of the Netherlands in general. 

So what I found very interesting is that when I did cast these people to reenact the past of this country because they looked the part, I felt that it was a great way to cross certain bridges or overcome certain issues. I mean, I'm a huge prehistory nerd, but I could not be cast because I'm too Caucasian-looking. The people from my cast, they were not particularly prehistory nerds themselves, but they did look the part. So that meant that, when I dressed them up, I did get them to engage with that part of the past, which really made them enthusiastic about the heritage of this particular region, namely the Netherlands. So it was really great to see that me as a prehistory nerd and them as the cast, that we both could completely bond over this… what we started seeing as our shared heritage. My DNA is not from this particular region. Their DNA isn't either. I don't look the part, they do look the part, so we equally connected to those people from that past. It was a great way that we could bond over this shared heritage of the place where all of us were born and raised, regardless what the background is because we're all from a different background. 

Noah: I think that's a great point there and it would be great if it can manage to do these things, make these connections across cultural, ethnic lines, and also just to simply bring more people into reenactment who may not have been considering it beforehand. It's possible that people, after having seen this film, might consider, "Oh, yeah, If there's someone who looks like me doing this sort of stuff, and I find it interesting, I can get into that." 

Frank: Absolutely, yeah. On the flip side of that, it's also very important that we can see the heritage of the region where we were born and raised as a shared heritage because we all come from whatever kind of migration wave. That's something that's been going on since time immemorial. So also in that sense, I hope it opens people's eyes a little bit to the fact that we all share that aspect as well. 

Noah: You mentioned earlier that you've done a bit of work for a YouTube channel before of the Museum Vrolik. Would you call this your first proper film project? 

Frank: Well, these YouTube films are short little documentaries, they're five to ten minutes with one talking head. So this is my first big production indeed.

Noah: Given that, can you tell me if you've noticed anything different in the ways that… your main medium photography and this medium film… in the ways that they can portray historical recreation or reenactments? 

Frank: My photographs, in and of themselves, also have quite a narrative kind of quality to it. I try to tell stories with my photos. So in that sense, it kind of naturally segues into moving images. The main difference is the goal, the purpose that the photos or films serve. For example, some of my photographs on life in the Mesolithic or Neolithic or prehistory, they are used in school books to illustrate what life might have looked like and that's then a nice audience that I serve. A film has a completely different type of audience, so then you also need to adjust your way of thinking, like, "How do I speak to this audience?" So that's been an interesting little challenge and I'm curious to see how it will be received. 

Noah: I've been given a small sneak peek at the film - for the viewers at home. From what I've seen I think that it'll be received quite well. It sounds like you've had a really great time making this film documentary. I was wondering, how has this rubbed off on you? Do you have any ideas about what your next plans might be, continuing in this sort of vein?

Frank: I would love to do more on this indeed. Photography is the core of my business, but the film thing did indeed rub off on me. It's a different way of communicating knowledge and things that I find important. So I'm hoping to do a next project where I could get some funding to keep doing archaeology and heritage communication through film, because I think it's a very good medium to do that. 

Noah: Frank, this wonderful film, where will we be able to see it, and whenabouts will it be coming out? 

Frank: By the time that we're recording this, I'm still finishing the editing. But by the time this airs, it is finished. I'm in contact with several museums and heritage institutions throughout the country where screenings will take place, and I will be present at most of them also. Do have a peek at the EXARC socials and also my socials for screening places and dates. Watch this space. 

Noah: That sounds great. I'm sure all of us here at EXARC can't wait for this film to be out. I'd like to thank you very much for being on, Frank. 

Frank: Thank you for having me, great fun. 

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