New evidence on salt use in the Neolithic of Southeast Europe

Salz und Gold: die Rolle des Salzes im prähistorischen Europa Salt and Gold: The Role of Salt in Prehistoric Europe 1 Salz und Gold: die Rolle des Salzes im prähistorischen Europa Akten der internationaler Fachtagung (Humboldt-Kolleg) in Provadia, Bulgarien 30 September – 4 October 2010 Herausgegeben von Vassil Nikolov und Krum Bacvarov Provadia • Veliko Tarnovo 2012 2 Salt and Gold: The Role of Salt in Prehistoric Europe Proceedings of the International Symposium (Humboldt-Kolleg) in Provadia, Bulgaria 30 September – 4 October 2010 Edited by Vassil Nikolov and Krum Bacvarov Provadia • Veliko Tarnovo 2012 3 Gedruckt mit Unterstützung der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Bonn, Deutschland Printed with the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Bonn, Germany Sprachredaktion: Krum Bacvarov (Englisch), Tabea Malter (Deutsch), Gassia Artin (Französisch) Graikdesign: Elka Anastasova © Vassil Nikolov, Krum Bacvarov (Hrsg.) © Verlag Faber, Veliko Tarnovo ISBN 978-954-400-695-2 4 Inhalt / Contens List of Contributors ................................................................................................................................ 7 Vorwort der Herausgeber / Editorial ..................................................................................................... 9 Vassil Nikolov Salt, early complex society, urbanization: Provadia-Solnitsata (5500-4200 BC) ................................. 11 Olivier Weller La production chalcolithique du sel à Provadia-Solnitsata : de la technologie céramique aux implications socio-économiques ...................................................... 67 Hristo Etropolski Technology of salt extraction by means of a Late Neolithic furnace from Provadia-Solnitsata .......... 89 Margarita Lyuncheva Tell Provadia-Solnitsata: The late Neolithic Karanovo III-IV period in the West Black Sea Coast context ..................................................................................................... 93 Viktoria Petrova Tell Provadia-Solnitsata: the Middle Chalcolithic layer in the context of the cultural development of the Western Black Sea area ......................................... 103 Petar Leshtakov The late Chalcolithic at Provadia-Solnitsata in the context of the West Black Sea Coast .................. 109 Krum Bacvarov Saltmaking and boundaries: Within and Without at Provadia-Solnitsata ........................................... 119 Desislava Takorova Long distance contacts in later prehistory: ecological, economical and social implications .............. 123 Dan Monah L’approvisionnement en sel des tribus chalcolithiques sédentaires et des tribus des steppes du Nord de la Mer Noire ............................................................................. 127 Ion Sandu, Olivier Weller, Marius Alexianu Analyses archéométriques sur les moules à sel chalcolithiques de l’est de la Roumanie .................. 143 Marius Alexianu, Olivier Weller, Robin Brigand, Roxana-Gabriela Curca Ethnoarchäologische Forschungen zu den Salzwasserquellen der moldauischen Vorkarpaten, Rumänien ......................................................................................... 155 Valeriu Cavruc, Antony Harding Prehistoric production and exchange of salt in the Carpathian-Danube Region ................................ 173 5 Cristian Schuster, Ionut Tutulescu Zum Salz im Nordosten Olteniens (Rumänien) in der Vorgeschichte bis ins Mittelalter. Eine Einführung .................................................................. 201 Nenad Tasic New evidence on salt use in the Neolithic of Southeast Europe ......................................................... 213 Slavisa Peric Die neolithischen Siedlungen in der mittleren Morava-Ebene und die Slatina-Toponymie ............... 219 Thomas Saile Salt in the Neolithic of Central Europe: production and distribution ................................................. 225 Albrecht Jockenhövel Bronzezeitliche Sole in Mitteldeutschland: Gewinnung - Distribution - Symbolik ........................... 239 Thomas Stöllner Prähistorischer Steinsalzbergbau - wirtschaftsarchäologische Betrachtung und neue Daten ............. 259 Martin Hees Die Bedeutung der vorgeschichtlichen Salzgewinnung in Südwestdeutschland ................................ 277 Peter Attema, Luca Alessandri Salt production on the Tyrrhenian coast in South Lazio (Italy) during the Late Bronze Age: its signiicance for understanding contemporary society ..................... 287 Elisa Guerra-Doce, F. Javier Abarquero-Moras, Germán Delibes-de Castro, Jesús del Val-Recio, Ángel L. Palomino-Lázaro Salt production at the Villafáila Lake Complex (Zamora, Spain) in prehistoric times ...................... 300 Isabella Tsigarida Bereiche der zentralen Einlussnahme auf Salz im Römischen Reich am Beispiel der Provinz Dakien ....................................................................... 313 Valeri Yotov Bulgarian control over the Salt Road in Transylvania during the 9th century: The archaeological evidence ............................................................................................................... 323 Evgeny Golovinsky Das Kochsalz - Urgeschichte und Gegenwart einer bedeutenden Substanz ....................................... 333 Mariana Mitewa, Christo Kolev Sodium Chloride: food and poison ..................................................................................................... 341 Petia Penkova Salt as a medicine for gold .................................................................................................................. 345 Anna Coleva-Dimitrova Das Salz in der bulgarischen Mikrotoponymie ................................................................................... 349 6 V. Nikolov & K. Bacvarov (eds). Salz und Gold: die Rolle des Salzes im prähistorischen Europa / Salt and Gold: The Role of Salt in Prehistoric Europe. Provadia & Veliko Tarnovo, 2012, 213-218. New evidence on salt use in the Neolithic of Southeast Europe Nenad N. Tasić When I irst started my work on the use of salt in the Early Neolithic, my impression was that almost no research has been done on the topic. Apart from J. Nenquin’s book Salt, A study in economic prehistory (1961) and particularly Adshead’s Salt and Civilization (1992), there were only a few articles considering the impact of salt on Neolithic societies. The importance of salt as a vital commodity has been recognised by V. Gordon Childe, who tended to explain the golden inds from Merseburg by the exchange and “commercial importance” of salt (1929, 244). These inds, however, belong to a much later prehistoric period. Paradoxically, the signiicance of salt has been neglected in studying the cultures of the Neolithic – the time of sedentarization of human populations, of domestication of animals and cultivation of plants. Except for some brief notes concerning salt trade (e.g. Sherratt 1976; Anati 1962; Gimbutas 1991) there have been no attempts to explain the connection between the salines and the Early Neolithic settlement pattern. It seemed as if the history of salt use has commenced as late as the salt-works at Hallstadt. To be positive regarding the control and use of certain resources by certain community one should ind material traces for it. It is fairly simple when material such as copper or gold is concerned. Marble, obsidian, lint and other trade items discovered in the archaeological record are more or less traceable but it is not possible to detect the use of kitchen salt so straightforwardly. It should be done by means of something which has been used to produce it, transport it, or manipulate it in some other way. In some of my earlier papers (see Tasić 1998 and 2000) I have discussed the use of salt as a commodity in the Neolithic period, and presented a hypothesis that salt has been one of the vital resources for the early inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula. I have also tried to show that even in the regions of primary neolithization in the Fertile Crescent, there was a strong link between salt sources and deposits and earliest settlements, offering another important occupation pattern. I have shown a number of examples which would prove my hypothesis but they were mainly of circumstantial character. I have mapped the Early Neolithic sites and overlapped them with presently known salt deposits, salt marshes or brines, relying also on the toponomastic research, searching for places which have Greek, Latin or Turkish word for salt in their names (hall; sal; tuz). The map I have produced in this way has shown that almost every known Early Neolithic settlement has been in one way or another associated with salt. Such is the case for almost each and every of the earliest sedentary sites in the Levant where the settlements were concentrated along the salt rich Jordan River, or those at the fringes of the salty Alepo desert. Similar situation occurs in Anatolia where salt lakes and salines have attracted the advancing Neolithic people. The vicinities of the lake Tuz (Tuz Gölü or Salt Lake in Turkish) and the Lake District in the Burdur area seemed to have lourished in the mid-eight millennium. Sites such as Hacılar, Hoyucek, Kuruçay, Çatalhöyük have all had an easy access to salt deposits or seasonal salt crusts on the lake shores. It is not possible to establish when and where people irst realized that domesticated animals need salt but the irst settled communities seemed to have been aware of this fact. As far as Southeast Europe is concerned the situation is rather similar. The Neolithic lourished in the salt-rich regions of Transylvania and at the sea shores especially in shallow waters around Volos and Thessaloniki in Greece. 213 Fig. 1. Map of the Starčevo culture and its variants The ethnographic literature comes in handy when “primitive” salt production techniques are concerned, which require only a source of salt and fuel, or in some cases merely manual labor for collecting surface salt from naturally evaporated inland salt lakes and marshes. No sophisticated technology was involved, which might have been an obstacle for the early agriculturalists and stock-breeders. There are many techniques of salt production that may have been applied in the Early Neolithic. We know of various brine evaporation techniques, extracting it from salty mud, as well as of the iltering of the ash of saline plants (Adshead 1992). 214 However, there are some more reliable pieces of evidence for the early salt production in the Balkans. This is the site of Poiana Slatinei Lunca in the Siret valley, where Middle Neolithic pottery has been discovered in context with a saline that was in use until very recently (Dumitroaia 1987, 253-258). Since no evidence of mass production was ascertained there, the discovery in the Siret River valley, at the far east of the Balkan Early Neolithic cultural complex, did not trigger widespread archaeological discussion on the role of salt for the new occupants of southeast Europe. Similar evidence is known from Gornja Tuzla, with its Starčevo culture cone-shaped pots that were linked with the production of salt (Čović 1961). Another – and probably the most convincing – evidence is an extremely important discovery made recently by V. Nikolov and his team (Николов 2008). This is the site of Provadia where conclusive evidence for salt production from brine has been found. It included briquetage, a salt-winning strategy which would become widespread in the next periods. This unprecedented discovery actually showed that the settled farming communities had needed salt and conirmed some of my deductions, such as the one (Tasić 2009) that large-scale salt production must have existed in the southeastern European Neolithic before the Late Neolithic (Chalcolithic) site of Provadia. Perhaps the least convincing, but nevertheless highly enlightening detail regarding salt use in the Neolithic was its lack in the central Starčevo culture area. No salt deposits are available there neither in the form of rock salt nor of brines but a few examples of the so-called slatina type soils and some surface salt in the summer season. However, a very successful Neolithic farming settlement pattern existed there, probably depending on the salt trade with salt-rich regions and seasonal movement of people and herds toward salt-rich pastures. No wonder it turned out that the Starčevo culture region had been surrounded by salt rich regions: irst, to the east in Transylvania (Ocna, Şeuşa, Limba, Gura Baçiului); another to the west, around Tuzla (Tuz, from Turkish = salt), and yet another one in the southern parts of the complex bordered by the shallow Thermaikos bay (Giannitsa). The archaeological record demonstrates a striking mixture of elements in the salt-rich regions of the Balkans, coming from the contemporaneous neighboring cultures (ig. 1). Such situation can be observed at the StarčevoKörös sites along the Körös and Mureş rivers, Starčevo-Criş sites in Transylvania and in the Siret and Prut valleys, Starčevo-Impresso and Starčevo-Vinča in Gornja Tuzla, and also Starčevo-Impresso in Albania (Kolsh) and along the border between Serbia and Albania. Further research in this direction could give further insights into the means of control over such an important resource. Whether some sort of monopoly over salines existed or not is still impossible to say. What could be said, on the other hand, is that it is obvious that common interest in such an important commodity as salt brought different groups of people together. It is quite clear, however, that the sites in the salt-rich regions appear to have been wealthier, more afluent and have lasted longer than the sites in salt-starved regions. The importance of easily accessible salt must have been even a bigger issue for the fully settled, more numerous and more densely populated Vinča culture society. Although the correlation between the disappearance of earlier and emergence of later culture/population is still not positively explained, it is apparent that the Late Neolithic Vinča culture covers almost identical area as the previous, Middle Neolithic Starčevo culture (ig. 2). According to the archaeological material from Gornja Tuzla, abundant rock-salt mine in east Bosnia, it is clear that the salt-rich regions attracted both populations. This is one of the rare places in the Balkans where a mixture of the two cultures has been found. The boundaries of the Vinča cultural complex have also been marked by salt-rich deposits in Transylvania, east Bosnia and Ovče pole near Anzabegovo in the Republic of Macedonia. One interesting bibliographic discovery in the Bulletin of the Hungarian Geological Society from 1898 (Horusitzky 1898) in the form of a map of salty sands and soils in parts of Vojvodina (ig. 3) made me perform the similar process of overlapping sites and salines once again, this time with the sites of the Late Neolithic Vinča culture. The result is impressive: almost all of the sites discovered so far in the Danube, Sava and Tisa valleys are located in areas with salty soils! This fact could imply that the Vinča culture communities could have met their daily needs for salt locally, using one of the evaporation techniques described in ethnographic literature (for more details see Tasić 2000 and 2009). This should not exclude salt trade, especially for those sites located south of the Rivers Sava and Danube, where 215 Fig. 2. The Vinča culture territory in relation to the Starčevo culture sites surface salt and salt deposits are extremely rare. The proximity to some other raw materials, such as copper ores, irewood, quality stone etc. and also the fertile and easily workable soils are certainly the reasons for the occupation of the salt-starved regions of the Central Balkans. Another piece of evidence for the salt use in the Neolithic of the Central Balkans is the result of a recently launched research project directed by K. Penezić, A. Kadereit, H. Thiemeyer and this author. The main goal of the project was to obtain new data for the reconstruction of paleo-environment in the catchment of the sites of Vinča and Starčevo, but it yielded some interesting results for the purposes of this paper as well. The preliminary results (provided in the form of personal communication by the authors) suggest that in the area between the two type sites (Starčevo and Vinča), which lasted throughout the Neolithic period in the Central Balkans, seasonal surface salt was probably easily available. The cores drilled, as well as the other collected samples and clues for the habitat reconstruction of the two sites have shown that on different depths between -240 and -260 cm relative to the surface the Ph values go over 8.00 which suggest that there is a considerable amount of salt in the subterranean deposits. In order to determine the character and origin of these salts it is necessary to perform further analyses but even now it is possible to ascertain that surface salt must have appeared in the marshes between Starčevo and Vinča. It is safe enough to say that this salt could have been used in stock-breeding, hide-curing and perhaps in human nutrition of Neolithic communities of the region as well. To put it shortly, on the basis of cartographic prospection and locations of salt sources, a causal relationship has been identiied, where the Neolithic settlements and salt sources are concerned. It appears that primary neolithization in the Levant, Anatolia, Greece, Transylvania and the Pannonian plain happened in areas with salt-rich soils, or in the vicinity of salt marches. The position of the Vinča culture sites in the Danube area suggest that the salt sources have remained crucial when choosing a 216 Fig. 3. Salty soils and sands and the Vinča culture settlements place for occupation even in the Late Neolithic. The site of Provadia not only clearly demonstrates this interdependence, but also conirms that mass production existed as early as the Neolithic. It is the irst direct evidence of mass production but it would certainly not be the last one that will be discovered. It appears briquetage was the inal proof after all that was needed by archaeological establishment in order to take the matters of salt use into serious consideration. References Николов 2008: В. Николов (ред.). Праисторически солодобивен център Провадия-Солницата. Разкопки 2005 - 2007 г. София, 2008. Тасић 2009: Н. Н. Тасић. Неолитска квадратура круга. Београд, 2009. Adshead 1992: S.A.M. Adshead. Salt and civilization. New York, 1992. Anati 1962: E. Anati. Prehistoric trade and the puzzle of Jericho. – Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 167, 1962, 25-31. Čović 1961: B. Čović. Rezultati sondiranja na preistoriskom naselju u Gronjoj Tuzli. – Glasnik zemaljskog muzeja u Sarajevu, 15-16, 1961, 79-139. Dumitroaia 1987: G. Dumitroaia. La station archéologique de Lunca-Poiana Slatinii. – In : M. Petrescu-Dîmbovita (ed.) La civilisation de Cucuteni en contexte européen (Bibliotheca archaeologica iassiensis, 1). Iasi, 1987, 253258. Gimbutas 1991: M. Gimbutas. The civilization of the Goddess: The world of Old Europe. San Francisco, 1991. Horusitzky 1898: H. Horusitzky. Löszterületek Magyarországon. – Földtani Közlöny, 28, 1898, 29-36. Nenquin 1961: J. Nenquin. Salt: A study in economic prehistory. (Dissertationes archaeologicae Gandenses, 6). Brügge, 1961. 217 Sherratt 1982: A. Sherratt. Mobile resources: Settlement and exchange in early agricultural Europe. – In: C. Renfrew, S. Shennan (eds) Ranking, resource and exchange: Aspects of the archaeology of early European society. Cambridge, 1982, 13-26. Tasić 1998: N.N. Tasić. U potrazi za solju. – IQ, 3, 1998, 40-45. Tasić 2000a: N.N. Tasić. Salt use in the Early and Middle Neolithic of the Balkan Peninsula. – In: L. Nikolova (ed.) Technology, style and society (British Archaeological Reports, International Series, 854). Oxford, 2000, 3541. Tasić 2000b: N.N. Tasić. The Neolithic settlement patterns and salt. – In: R.M. Geertman, B.V. Elsevier (eds) Proceedings of the 8th World Salt Symposium, vol. 2. Amsterdam, 2000, 1139-1144. 218