The History
Of Salt
| Salt
was in use long before recorded history. Since the dawn of time, animals have
forged trails to natural salt sources to satisfy their need for
salt. Ancient man obtained his salt from eating the animals. As he turned to
farming, he searched out new sources of find salt for his vegetables and crops
to satisfy the body’s requirement for the mineral. Over many millennia, he
learned how salt helped to preserve food, cure hides, heal wounds. Nomadic bands
would have carried salt with them and traded it with other bands for different
goods.
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About
4,700 years ago, the Chinese Png-tzao-kan-mu, one of the earliest known
writings, recorded more than 40 types of salt. It described two methods of
extracting and processing salt, similar to methods still in use today.
Iron Age
Evidence has been found of late Iron Age salt production
in many areas of Britain, including Teesside, Tyneside, Worcestershire, East Anglia and Cheshire. Of
these, only Cheshire remains as a major centre for edible white salt production, although
rock salt is still mined in Teeside and Northern Ireland.
Before the Roman invasion, there was a flourishing salt
industry around the Wash where the salt was evaporated in pottery pans 60cm wide, 120cm
long, and about 12mm thick supported on handbricks - rough cylinders 7-10mm long made by
squeezing clay by hand, known as 'briquetage'.
Archaeologists have found evidence of a pre-Roman,
iron-age salt industry centred between Middlewich and Crewe.
Cheshire was on a Neolithic trade route which crossed the
salt fields where Iron-Age Britons probably traded Westmoreland stone axe-heads for salt.
IRON
AGE ROMANS
NORMANS Production
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