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Salt Mine

Bronze Age mining

The scale and technical complexity of the oldest phase of salt mining below ground (around 3500 BC) indicate that even at this early stage there was already a long tradition of salt mining in Hallstatt. Bronze Age salt mining ended around 1245 BC as the result of a debris flow. The finds spanning over 2000 years give a detailed insight into Bronze Age mining but also throw up many new questions for researchers to answer.

The oldest finds
Hallstatt as a trading hub
Unanswered questions
The end of Bronze Age mining

 

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The oldest finds

For more than 3,500 years, salt has been mined at Hallstatt. The oldest evidence of salt mining dates back to the 15th century BC, that is to say, the Middle Bronze Age. But those finds presumably do not represent the beginning of mining activities; on the contrary, they reveal fully developed underground mining of considerable proportions. Three different mineshafts were operated simultaneously, reaching a depth of more than 100 metres. The cross-section of a shaft was about the size of a family house.
 

Hallstatt as a trading hub

Hallstatt produced salt for a huge market. The nearest major suppliers were several hundred kilometres away, in Central and South Germany, so we may assume that Hallstatt salt was traded over long distances as early as the Bronze Age, and that Hallstatt was an important commercial centre.
 

Unanswered questions

How far back does this mining activity date? How long did it take to reach these depths, and resolve the technical difficulties? Decades, centuries, or perhaps thousands of years? When did mining actually start in Hallstatt? We have not yet found the answers to these questions. The huge dimensions of the mining site raise more questions, because its operation poses considerable technical, organisational and social challenges. To begin with the technical issue, we must first ask by what technique it became possible to reach the mining depths. But the technical problems are not limited to going into the mountain. The technical challenges increase with increasing depth: ventilation, water drainage, transport of people and material.

How was it possible to deal with the infrastructural and logistical problems of work assignment and work processes, supply – for instance, with wood and bronze – and provisioning the work force with food and clothes? The important finds from the Appoldwerk, the research project in the Grünerwerk, and the current excavations in the Christian von Tuschwerk provide many answers, but raise a lot of new questions. In particular, little is known about the social conditions of Bronze Age mining communities.
 

The end of Bronze Age mining

So far, the Bronze Age mine have not yielded any wooden item dating any later than 1245 BC. In the Early Iron Age, in the 9th century BC, evidence of mining activities resumes, although in another area. There is thus a gap of some 400 years between the Bronze Age and Iron Age mining.

(Reschreiter, H. – Kowarik, K. – Loew, C.)
  
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