[ad_1]
Neolithic people made salt in Britain nearly 6,000 years ago, before Stonehenge was built and more than two millennia earlier than previously thought, a new archaeological discovery suggests.
Excavations at a site at the Street House farm in North Yorkshire have revealed evidence of the first salt production site ever found in the UK and one of the first of its kind in Western Europe, dating to around 3,800 BC. C.
The finds, discovered at a coastal hilltop site near Loftus, include a trench containing three hearths, broken shards of Neolithic pottery, some still containing salt deposits, shaped stone artifacts, and a storage pit. , all key evidence of salt processing.
According to Steve Sherlock, the archaeologist who led the excavation, the finds are “spectacular and of national importance.” Numerous Bronze Age salt work sites are known in Britain, the oldest of which dates from around 1400 BC. But although Neolithic salt flats have been found in continental Europe, especially in Poland and the Balkans, no comparable sites were known in the UK.
Sherlock is a professional archaeologist working primarily with business partners, including Highways England, and led excavations on the development of the A14 in Cambridgeshire. However, his annual Street House excavations with a team of volunteers are part of his own self-funded research.
“It took me a while to gain the confidence to stand up and say, ‘This could change the way we view the Neolithic,’” he said. But he sought the opinion of other academic experts on ancient salt production “and everyone thinks that this is proof of the exploitation of Neolithic salt, and it is tremendously significant.”
Their research appears in the June issue of the peer-reviewed journal Antiquity.
The people using the Street House site at the time were like “pioneers,” said Sherlock, who had cut down oak and elm forests to form his settlements. The pottery found at the site was of a type introduced by people who emigrated from northern France around 4,000 BC, and “the technology of salt work probably came with these migratory people,” Sherlock said.
Previous research on pottery found at Street House showed lipid deposits, indicating the presence of dairy products and suggesting a society that was moving away from hunter-gathering to a more settled agricultural lifestyle that depended on farming and farming. of animals.
Salt would have been a rare and very valuable commodity at that time, as it allowed food to be preserved for use during the winter. “The people who can control and manage the salt and distribute it are usually the richest elements in society,” he said. Other structures dating to the period excavated at the Street House, including a cairn, a mortuary structure and a house, indicate a community that was thriving.
Sherlock believes that early Neolithic people would have collected seawater on nearby beaches, where it was allowed to evaporate into a concentrated brine. This was then transported to the processing site and stored in a brine pit, before the brine was heated in pots, which were then smashed to retrieve the salt cakes. They are likely to be exchanged for other goods later.
The fact that no comparable Early Neolithic sites have been found may simply be due to sea level rise and coastal erosion in the intervening six millennia, Sherlock said.
The discovery, he said, “changes our view of [early neolithic people]the ability to grow and prepare and cook food. We need to think about the dynamics of how this industrial process worked and how it is marketed and distributed. It changes the way these people are viewed, as farmers, to people who are doing a level of industrial processing and distributing this product in an area. “
