Salt - to become rich. But how?

For many, reaching for the salt shaker is an automatic action, even before you've tasted the food. For others, it's a health risk, and for the rest, it's a question of origin. But we can hardly imagine life without salt, even animals need it.

And to salt we owe a huge part of our knowledge about the Celts, because we here in Austria are in the lucky position to have the "cradle of Celticism", and that in a salt mine of all places!

For thousands of years salt has been mined in Hallstatt, huge, almost seemingly endless tunnels have been dug into the mountain by the people there, leaving behind a lot of things - pieces of cloth, tools, cooking utensils and even food remains and feces. All this has been preserved in the salt and today offers a paradise for archaeologists and history buffs. To "sprinkle on top" there is also a huge burial ground, where jewelry and other grave offerings can be found ...

But we were talking about salt, which was obviously already of great importance to the Celts, because Hallstatt was a rich settlement through trade with the "white gold".
And they quite obviously had a monopoly, for whatever reason. Because there were quite a lot more salt deposits in the near and far surroundings, but most of them were not exploited.

Now there are several ways to get salt. One can dig into the mountain, as in Hallstatt, and bring to light mountain salt, be it from the Alps or from the distant Himalayas. The Hallstatt "trademark" were the heart-shaped lumps in which they mined salt.

Another possibility is sea salt, which is extracted in shallow (rock) basins - sea water in, sun on, evaporation on, and you have sea salt. (Whereby, strictly speaking, also mountain salt is sea salt, which is only already quite old). Unfortunately we never had this possibility here in Austria, except in the k.u.k. time, when Trieste belonged to us.

But there is a third possibility, which I first got to know at the "Interpreted Iron Times" in Linz: There is a kind of middle thing, namely salt springs. These are springs that have flowed through salty rocks and thus carry salt water with them. There were (and are, I assume) also some of these in Austria. The only problem is that at certain times we do not have enough sunlight to extract the salt from the salt water. So they built ovens in which the salt water was evaporated in relatively small clay cups, which stood on "pillars" about 30cm high.

Experiments in experimental archaeology showed that the clay vessels first had to be heated empty before the brine was poured in, and that a constant heat supply for 10-12 hours was essential. The clay pots, by the way, were disposable packages in which the salt was then transported and which were then smashed when they arrived at their destination, the kitchen fire. Thus, they also provide good clues about trade routes at that time, because the shards of clay (with "proof of origin stamp") remained at the destination ... Who says that garbage is always something bad!

Salt was used in large quantities, because it was used for preservation, especially of meat. Hallstatt excelled at this as well, operating a "joint venture" - instead of hauling the salt to the meat farmers, they hauled the pigs up the mountain (why haul salt when the pigs can walk?), slaughtered them there, put them in large surging basins, and then hung the (not yet) bacon in the salt mine to dry. They were obviously shrewd businessmen, the Hallstatt people, even back then.

Salt was also a popular commodity, since it was used everywhere and was non-perishable.
Another basis for the prosperity of the Celts ... completely without raids and plundering.