Archaeology and Anthropology of salt. Cover

Archaeology and Anthropology of Salt: A Diachronic Approach Proceedings of the International Colloquium, 1-5 October 2008 Al. I. Cuza University (Iaşi, Romania) Edited by Ă Marius Alexianu Olivier Weller Roxana-Gabriela Curcă BAR International Series 2198 2011 Table of Contents Foreword.......................................................................................................................................vii Welcoming Speech ......................................................................................................................... 1 Nicolae Ursulescu Part I. Ethnographic Approaches of Salt Salt Springs in Today’s Rural World. An Etnoarchaeological Approach in Moldavia (Romania) ....................................................................................................................................... 7 Marius Alexianu, Olivier Weller, Robin Brigand, Roxana-Gabriela Curcă, Vasile Cotiugă, Iulian Moga New Ethnoarchaeological Investigations upon the Salt Springs in Valea Muntelui, Romania ........................................................................................................................................ 25 Dan Monah, Gheorghe Dumitroaia, Dorin Nicola Traditional Methods of Salt Mining in Buzău County, Romania in the 21st Century .......... 35 Doina Ciobanu El Salado-Ixtahuehue and Benito Juárez-Soconusco: an Ethno-Archaeological Study of Salt Pre-Industries of Southeast Veracruz, Mexico.............................................................. 37 Jorge A. Ceja Acosta The Saltmakers of Soconusco and Benito Juárez: An Interpretation of Ethnoarchaelogical Data from the Perspective of Gender and Identity................................. 49 María Luisa Martell Contreras Part II. Archaeological Salt Exploitation Provadia-Solnitsata (NE Bulgaria): A Salt-Producing Center of the 6th and 5th Millennia BC................................................................................................................................. 59 Vassil Nikolov Tell Provadia-Solnitsata (Bulgaria): Data on Chalcolithic Salt Extraction ........................... 65 Viktoria Petrova Spatial Analysis of Prehistoric Salt Exploitation in Eastern Carpathians (Romania) .......... 69 Olivier Weller, Robin Brigand, Laure Nuninger, Gheorghe Dumitroaia The Cucuteni C Pottery near the Moldavian Salt Springs....................................................... 81 Roxana Munteanu, Daniel Garvăn Some Salt Sources in Transylvania and their Connections with the Archaeological Sites in the Area............................................................................................................................ 89 Gheorghe Lazarovici, Cornelia-Magda Lazarovici New Archaeological Researches concerning Saltworking in Transylvania. Preliminary Report.......................................................................................................................................... 111 Valeriu Cavruc, Anthony F. Harding The Beginning of the Salt Exploitation in Spain: Thinking about the Salt Exploitation in the Iberian Peninsula during Prehistoric Times................................................................. 123 Jesús Jiménez Guijarro Part III. Ancient Texts and Salt Salt in the Antiquity: a Quantification Essay.......................................................................... 137 Bernard Moinier Hypotheses, Considerations – and unknown Factors – regarding the Demand for Salt in Ancient Greece ....................................................................................................................... 149 Cristina Carusi Historical Development of the ‘salinae’ in Ancient Rome: from Technical Aspects to Political and Socio-Economic Interpretations......................................................................... 155 Nuria Morère Molinero Salt in Tanning, Dyeing and Cleaning in Ancient Egypt ....................................................... 163 Virginie Delrue Part IV. Historical Approaches Salt Production in Mediterranean Andalusia in the Transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages ............................................................................................................... 171 Antonio Malpica Cuello Land Organisation and Salt Production in Region of the Salado River (Sigüenza, Province of Guadalajara, Spain): Ancient and Medieval Times. Results of the First Campaign 2008........................................................................................................................... 179 Antonio Malpica Cuello, Nuria Morère Molinero, Adela Fábregas García, Jesús Jiménez Guijarro Sea Salt and Land Salt. The Language of Salt and Technology Transfer (Portugal since the Second Half of the 18th Century) .............................................................................. 187 Inês Amorim A short Overview on the Main Salt Production in Italy from the End of the Middle Ages up to the Modern Period .................................................................................................. 197 Valdo D’Arienzo Part V. Linguistic and Philological Approaches ‘Salty’ Geographical Names: A Fresh Look............................................................................ 209 Alexander Falileyev Etymological and Historical Implications of Romanian Place-Names Referring to Salt.... 215 Adrian Poruciuc Salt in the Greek and Latin Aphoristic Phrase ....................................................................... 219 Mihaela Paraschiv Index of Authors......................................................................................................................... 225 vi Foreword In the era of industrialization salt has progressively become a trivial element. It ceased to be considered ‘white gold’ once the era of refrigeration dawned. The phenomenon of globalization helped in this process. Today’s advanced societies forget that salt, the only edible mineral for Man, is absolutely necessary for animal life in general. They forget that many salt springs mark the location of Neolithic communities, and that such springs have always attracted animals and birds. (As a consequence, those places became hunting grounds, and the maintenance of control over salt unleashed bloody battles.) Mankind forgets that salt is divine (Homer), that it is the soul of dead flesh (Plutarch), that it ensures the preservation of food for non-productive seasons, and that it once determined the flourishing of Rome, or of Venice. We all forget that salt is a primordial reference. archaeohistorical character, and a more and more strongly anthropological one. Europe is also the host to some important research projects underway on the role of salt in the prehistory or the history, or both, of diverse zones of Europe. Extremely important research is going on in Asia and Mexico, and ethnological research in South America, Western Africa and Oceania. All this demonstrates more than convincingly that research centered on the theme of salt, irrespective of its nature, is gaining a more and more individualized place in the totality of humanities research in the whole world. In Romania, extremely rich in salt resources, the first international colloquium on archaeological salt was organized in 2004 by the Piatra Neam History Museum, an institution well-known for its research into the Cucuteni culture. In 2008, a similar scientific event, more open to the anthropological approaches, took place at the “Al. I. Cuza” University of Iaşi, at which professors revealed pioneering work, which had begun in the 1950s, on the relationships between salt and human communities in Romanian prehistory. A narrow group of specialists has taken on the task of giving back these essential truths to the present. From books espousing a synthetic approach which illustrated comprehensive visions, there was a gradual movement to increasingly analytical approaches, which were capable of explaining the most diverse aspects of the role played by the places which were rich in salt, or in brine all over the world. These places have left an imprint both on the life in human communities or on landscapes and also generated a specific (micro)toponymy and (micro)hydronymy. Salt has generated a complex symbolism, a whole spiritual world reflected in a remarkable lexical constellation in the world languages. Salt has influenced the environment and animal life; but its strongest effects were those on the life of Man. The anthropology of salt seems to be the precise syntagm which reunites, under a unifying name, the whole collection of studies within the humanities, preeminently, focused on the influence of salt on the development of human communities everywhere in the world. Organization of this colloquium was made possible within the generous framework offered by a Romanian project 1, centered on traditional behaviors in an area with the oldest evidence for salt production in Europe, and probably worldwide. For three days, between 2 and 4 October 2008, almost 30 researchers from Europe (Bulgaria, France, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain, United Kingdom) and America (Mexico) presented the results of their work in the field. A real balance between the traditional and interdisciplinary types of approach could be noticed, between the revaluations of old data and new records which were mostly archaeological. The organizers wished to capture as many perspectives on the complex phenomenon of salt, against the background of the elements which determined the prehistory and history of human communities. Clearly, the papers presented at this conference could not exhaust these intentions, as they tended to illustrate many possible approaches to a multidimensional phenomenon. We would like to emphasize that, beside the usual contributions from archaeologists, historians, and ethnologists, this colloquium also sought to stimulate a literary and linguistic approach, in order to underline fruitful ways of research into areas whose practitioners were otherwise unassertive, unsystematic and rather peripheral. If we limit ourselves to Europe, studies focused on salt from the perspective of studies within the humanities have been stimulated, over the last two decades, by the organization, in a sustained rhythm, of conferences whose focus was predominantly archaeological (Paris 1998, Liège 2001, Cardona 2003, Piatra Neam 2004, Arc-et-Senans 2006) or of those which had a predominantly historical focus (Halle/Saale 1992, Granada 1995, Cagliari 1998, Weimar 2001, Nantes 2004, Sigüenza 2006). But this separation between the archaeological and historical spheres has mostly been a didactic one, as a result of the practical conclusion that the archaeological conferences included historical approaches, while the historical ones also included archaeological approaches. In other words, these conferences have progressively had an 1 Salt springs in Moldavia: the ethnoarchaeology of a polyvalent natural resource, (414/2007), financed by the National Council for Scientific Research in Higher Education (2007-2010). vii Foreword This volume of proceedings starts with the talk held by Professor Nicolae Ursulescu from the Faculty of History of the University of Iaşi. This decision was made as a sign of respect to him as the author of the first Romanian analytical study devoted to a salt spring with archaeological vestiges from the first European Neolithic Age, and generally for his work in the field of salt archaeology in Romania. The 23 studies in this volume illustrate some distinct approaches from the point of view of topic and chronology. the studies in this section emphasize, in various degrees of intensity, the idea of continuity of the different forms of salt exploitation, either on the coast, or the exploitation of salt rivers or mines in continental areas. The need for dialogue between history and prehistory, between history and other disciplines of the Humanities comes out once again. The final section, Linguistic and Philological Approaches, has been deliberately separated from the others precisely in order to emphasize the importance of reflexes in the language and mentality of salt in different ethno-cultural locations. One of the studies represents a critical synthesis at the level of common Indo-European and different Indo-European lexicons, while another study refers to Romanian halohydronomy and halotoponymy which reflect a zone of ethnic interferences. The degree of deep and diverse influence of salt on the world of Latin paremiology and that of different European peoples is another relevant topic for the symbolism of salt. Two case studies on salt springs in Romania and two on those in Mexico offer the possibility of contrastive analysis of an ethnoarchaeological nature; beyond the structural invariables of salt exploitation, there are notable differences at the level of the phenomenon under survey and all the types of approaches involved. Special mention must be made about the study on the primitive forms of salt mining still practiced today in the Carpathian bend zone. The topic of archaeological salt exploitation starts with two studies which refer to the most recent discoveries in Bulgaria, at Provadia-Solnitsata. From the very beginning of research, this has become a highly important and interesting point of reference for the European archaeology of salt. Four studies illustrating different stages of research approach the problem of numerous salt springs or salt outcrops in Moldavia and Transylvania. These studies were either predominantly given in the form of a presentation, or they give models of interpretation. A study on the origins of salt exploitation in Spain offers the possibility of a contrastive analysis. While all these approaches cover thematically, chronologically and methodologically different topics, so disparate a first sight, they have in common the complex relationship of humanity during its whole evolution to the sine qua non element of reference which is salt, a primordial element which left a strong imprint on everyday supply and consumption structures, and not just those alone. Technical behaviors related to this polyvalent mineral resource, the social, therapeutic, linguistic and spiritual implications are but some of the more important aspects of what we have come to know as the anthropology of salt. Ancient texts represent the starting point of some interdisciplinary analysis focussed on some salt uses in Ancient Egypt, on the quantification of salt needs in Greek and Roman Antiquity, as well on the complex reconstruction of the multiple dimensions connoted by a key term in Ancient Rome: salina. Clearly, by the nature of their strongly exploratory nature, these studies sometimes courageously answer the questions raised by ancient texts. These epistemic trials illustrate the difficulties created by the nonexistence of more detailed ancient texts and a distinct non-literary referent. We should not therefore be surprised that even if the researcher does have written references, paradoxically, after all, we are in the middle of prehistory more often than not. M.A., O.W., R.-G. C. Acknowledgements The quality of this publication is due partially to the financial support of National Council for Scientific Research in Higher Education (Romania), the Commission for Foreign Excavations (French Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and the Daad Alumni Club of Iaşi (represented by Professor Lucre iu Bîrliba). The editors thank Mr. Christopher Lawson, M.A., for translating some of the articles and for the language improvement of the English versions of some contributions to the present volume. Historical approaches include three studies which refer to the Iberian Peninsula and one about the Italian Peninsula. All these approaches aim at the fullest possible reconstruction of the past, and emphasize the need to refer to the results of other disciplines, from landscape archaeology, paleogeography and geomorphology to linguistics. We should note that all We also thank Ana-Maria Buşilă, a Ph.D. candidate at the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, for her editorial input to this work. viii