Stone Age Salt Complex found in Yorkshire

[guy]

This is a recent discovery of a salt complex sheds light on the economy of Neolithic (later Stone Age) Britain almost 6000 years ago:

 

 

Quote

Archaeologists working on the Yorkshire coast have unearthed the oldest salt-making complex ever found in Western Europe, in a find that is set to revolutionize our understanding of Britain’s prehistoric economy.
Dating back almost 6,000 years, the site – complete with salt ovens or hearths – predates almost 2,400 years to the oldest known British salt ‘factory’.

The discovery has huge implications for our understanding of how the Neolithic British economy worked – and suggests that it was much larger and more efficient than previously thought.

The economy relied heavily on cattle – without salt, however, it would have been impossible to operate such an economy effectively.

 

Quote

Extracting salt from seawater is a time-consuming and complex operation, requiring considerable skill. Any ancient coastal culture that was able to master that technology would have been able to expand their economy substantially,” said one of Britain’s top authorities on sea-salt production, David Lea-Wilson, who runs a traditional sea-salt extraction operation, Halen Mon, in Anglesey, north Wales.

The discovery that Neolithic people had the technology to make salt has major implications for the modern world’s understanding of how Britain’s early agricultural economy functioned.

Salt would have enabled Neolithic people to very substantially increase their beef and dairy production – by making it possible for them to properly preserve meat.

Without salt, they would have been unable to efficiently manage their cattle assets – the basis of much of their economy.

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/yorkshire-salt-archaeology-neolithic-britain-b1824440.html

Quote

There are no sources of rock salt in the Yorkshire area (and, in any case, rock-salt extraction would not have required kilns), so the salt was almost certainly being made from sea water.

Quote

The recently discovered salt-making ovens in Yorkshire were built around 3750 BC – about 750 meters from the top of a 200-meter-high cliff overlooking the North Sea.

The location of the salt flats was likely determined by the availability of wood that could be burned to heat the kilns – and by the wind speed inducing the evaporation of water (sometimes over 70 mph) near the edge of the cliff.

The site is arguably one of Britain’s most ideal locations for salt production, as the coastal topography at this point (known as Boulby Cliffs, which is part of the North York Moors National Park) is higher and windier than anywhere else along the east and south coasts of England; indeed, they are almost twice as high as the White Cliffs of Dover.

https://www.fr24news.com/a/2021/03/how-a-new-archaeological-find-in-yorkshire-could-rewrite-british-prehistory.html

 

 

Summary: As I've written before in a previous post dealing with Mayan salt production, it is easy to forget today about the importance of salt in ancient times, from preserving food to seasoning. By being able to preserve the food, it removed the dependence on local production and allowed food transport over long distances.

 

 

guy also known as gaius

Edited October 14, 2021 by guy