Salt in Prehistoric Europe by Harding Anthony

Author:Harding, Anthony.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Europe / General
ISBN: 9789088902383
Publisher: Sidestone Press
Published: 2013-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

The scale of production

As discussed above, the scale of Iron Age production using briquetage was on a completely different scale from that seen in the Bronze Age. The great batteries of flues and furnaces recovered in the Seille valley, and the tonnes of briquetage, can only mean production on an industrial scale. By comparison, the Bronze Age briquetage sites around Halle bespeak regular but not large-scale production, since each site is restricted in extent. For Hallstatt, the quantities involved cannot be known in detail, but it is clear that there were more mines in operation in the Iron Age than the Bronze Age, and since the latter lasted longer than the former it is reasonable to suppose that Iron Age production was much larger than Bronze Age production. But in none of these cases is it known in what form the salt obtained was transported. Hallstatt itself has provided a large amount of organic material for carrying salt around the site, in textile, leather and wood (Kern et al. 2009: 6061, 102-5), so such containers may well have been used for further transportation as well. This is speculative, but reasonable speculation.

With coastal lagoons we are again in the realm of speculation, but since it is known that coastal Italy supplied the needs of Rome (and presumably its many other large cities as well) one must suppose that production was on a large scale. In such situations one would not expect to find specific archaeological evidence, any more than today’s installations require much more than buildings to store the salt.

The sites that used the trough technique, however, provide good evidence for extensive production capabilities. I have discussed in Chapter 5 the potential of the Romanian trough sites in this respect. While one would hesitate to call these sites industrial, the scale of production seems to have been extensive and long-lived.

Valeriu Cavruc and I have considered how different production techniques might have been used in prehistoric times, and led to different end-users of the product (Cavruc & Harding 2012). In this analysis, we distinguished between domestic, industrial and sacred salt production, suggesting the parameters one might expect for each type. Thus domestic production should take place close to the settlement, use quite simple technology, process the product minimally, and produce relatively small quantities for household consumption. By contrast, industrial production would take place wherever major salt sources were available (sometimes at considerable distances from settlement), producing high quality salt in large quantities, destined principally for exchange. Finally, ritual or sacred salt production would aim to produce very high quality salt, using specialised technology and much processing; the product would be intended for specialist use, probably at some distance from the place of production, and the quantity produced might be quite small.

These are theoretical notions of production; the task remains to consider how they might relate to the archaeological evidence. In the absence of clear indications of how the process operated there is some guesswork involved here, but we maintain that most production using briquetage, prior to the Iron Age, was domestic in character, and small in scale.

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