In the year 1734 three miners were taken aback when they discovered a male body inside Hallstatt salt mine. The body was very well preserved, having been mummified by salt. Accounts of the time say that the dead body, completely embedded into the rock salt deposits, was discovered following a collapse in the Kilbwerk. His shoes and traces of his clothes had been preserved: 'One can even see a bit of cloth on his dress, and the remains of the shoes on his feet'. The mine workers assumed that it was the long-dead body of a miner who had lived before the first official records, that is, more than 400 years earlier, but after thorough analysis and investigation, today’s assumption is that this man was the victim of a mining accident approximately 1000 BCE. The heyday of prehistoric mining was in the late Iron Age between 800 and ca. 400 BCE. At that time, miners would penetrate as much as 200 metres into the mountain, in the Austrian Alps, extracting not gold or precious metals but copious amounts of salt, about half a tonne a day with hand tools, supplying salt to half of Europe 2000 years ago!
Hello!
Today we are busting all the old myths about the salt!
What and how the Romans used it?
What did the Greeks say about it?
Humans, like other mammals, relied on the small amounts of salt naturally present in food to regulate the amount of fluid in the body. Very powerful mechanisms for conserving salt within the body were developed. For 5 million years, our ancestors added no salt to their diet. The addition of salt to food began relatively recently, about 5000 years ago. As people became increasingly addicted to it, salt became the most important object of trade and the economic foundation of several empires. It was used by authoritarian governments to control their people and as the main source of tax revenue.
Join me on another archaeogastronomical adventure!
The Delicious Legacy Podcast
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