Iron Age salt-mining complex found beneath Hallstatt in Austria
archaeologymag.comI just finished listening to the audiobook of Mark Kurlanskys Salt: A World History[0]. Fascinating and highly recommended.
[0] https://www.markkurlansky.com/books/salt-a-world-history/
This is a good one. Also Cod gives a rather interesting deviation from the common idea of how the North Atlantic got explored/discovered.
Can confirm, it's a fantastic book!
The name Halstatt seems to mean Salt Town.
Hallstatt means salt stead - a place where you find salt.
Stadt (town) was derived from Statt - here's a good explanation of that: https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/Stadt-Statt...
Words stead, stan, state all come from pro-Indo-European root *sta- that means land, country, place.
Rob Words on YouTube had a video on it recently https://youtu.be/iP6n2zTHtUQ?t=1018
Thanks! Learned a lot
Salzburg is only 70km from Halstatt, but interestingly that name comes from nearby Reichenhall (Germany), another big salt producer.
Are you sure the name comes from Reichenhall? A few km upriver from Salzburg is Hallein, with another saltmine nearby. It's a very salty area.
No, it means nothing. You shall not needlessly anglicize.
The name Hallstadt (not the two l letters) means Salt Town.
Or, actually "place". In a lot of location names of germanic origin "stadt" doesn't the current semantics, of being a town with > 10.000. More often than not it just means "place".
And "Hall" is an old term for salt. Many towns related to salt have it in their names, in many places of Germany and Austria. "Halle an der Saale" in Thüringen, Bad Reichenhall (Bayern), Hall im Tirol (Österreich), Schwäbisch-Hall (Baden-Württemberg) etc.
"Hall" is believed to be of celtic origin.
And the double l is important. German is a language where in the written form you look at the letters and you immediately see how it is spoken. A double vocal makes the speed slower, and a double consonant makes the speech faster. So "Halstadt" would be slow Hal (so more emphasize on the "a" instead), and "Hallstadt" would be a fast "Hall", similar in speed like the english "hell": little emphasize on the "a".
Medieval German didn't have fixed rules for writing. The same word was written in different ways on the same page, so many words inherited from the Middle Ages cannot be taken literally under modern writing rules.
>> German didn't have fixed rules for writing. The same word was written in different ways on the same page
One of the most common words from Willaim Clark's journals (of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804) was "mosquito" and he used over a dozen different spellings. Spellings were never really standardized .. until the internet giving us the ability to critique every little detail of each other's writings.
From Google AI: "mesquestors, misquestors, misquitor, misquitoes, misquitors, misqutors, misqutr, missquetors, mosquiters, mosquitors, mosquitos, muskeetor, musqueters, musquetors, musquiters, musquitoes, musquitors, musqueters, musqutors"
The first dictionaries appeared in the early 1800s. The internet wasn't the driving force.
> German is a language where in the written form you look at the letters and you immediately see how it is spoken.
Lol, written vs spoken German is just as ambigious as any other language with too few letters in the alphabet. Just look at "ich" vs "ach" (and then of course there's dozens of local dialects that don't even have spelling rules and would need even bigger alphabets if "done right").
No, not all languages are the same about the correlation of spelling and pronunciation. Of European languages, English is the least predictable, Spanish is the most predictable, and German is (about equidistant) between them. Spanish had a spelling reform the shortest time ago, English never had one.
Source: Read it somewhere a long time ago, sorry.
English never had a spelling reform? Noah Webster might beg to differ...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/about-us/spelling-reform
Maybe you meant a "complete" spelling reform, but hardly any reform is 'complete' if you look at it closely.
> He changed the –ce in words like defence, offence, and pretence to –se; abandoned the second, silent "l" in verbs such as travel and cancel when forming the past tense; dropped the "u" from words such as humour and colour; and dropped the "k" from words such as publick and musick.
Isn't most of it just the difference between british and american english? I was definitely taught the "old" style in my english education and still see it being used. So it does not seem to have been really universally acknowledged/adhered to as a reform?
Not that english language has not changed but it seems that there is not as much of a centralised, widely adopted and intentional reform to match the written form with the spoken one.
You're loudly agreeing with me. ;)
If they had said English has had no centralized or universally accepted spelling reform, then I'd have to agree with that statement! But they said English has had no spelling reforms, and that's clearly untrue.
I'd perhaps go for "major" spelling reform. German has had a small one around 2000 as well, but such reforms don't do much to change the overall situation (unless repeated every 10 years, I guess).
That’s still nothing like the reform other languages have had.
Who said all spelling reforms are the same? Nobody. My point is that saying English has had no spelling reforms is inaccurate.
The editors of major English dictionaries have certainly had significant impact on English as She is Spoke, but we cannot ignore the fact that the Spanish language is centrally codified and prescriptive (like the French language), while English is distinctly decentralized, and its dictionaries are correspondingly descriptive, more often than not.
Spanish has notably gone through some orthography reforms since I learned it in high school, in the 1980s, and so among other things, the idiosyncratic "sort order" which we learned doesn't really apply anymore. In school, we also learned to be aware of the vosotros first-person plural, but we didn't really learn all the forms, because we were chiefly learning Mexican/LatAm vernacular Spanish.
"You speak what you see" does not mean that every letter or combination of consonants is pronounced the same, but that there are clear rules that determine how every thing is spoken (with exceptions being rare). The fact that "ch" is pronounced differently depending on the vowel before is a consistent rule. In contrast in languages like english you do not have consistent rules like that for a big part of the language, to the extent that a native speaker encountering a new word (eg a street or town name) may not know how to speak or write it.
The not/note typo strikes again, it reverses the meaning of a phrase.
Hallstatt is one of these places to visit. It's topology alone is crazy, built on the edge of a mountain right above a lake. Nobody reasonable would build a city there, unless there was a really good reason for it. And the value of salt was that reason. But that topology is also the reason why a lot of the city is extremely old today.
Hallstatt as a town is also affected by overtourism, especially since some Asian soap opera used it as a film location. But it is one of the places that is still worth a visit.
There’s a copy of it in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_(China)
(It’s good to have backups, right?)
I thought the over tourism is because it was rated as the most beautiful town in the world or something
because of the overtourism problem I would advise against a visit
I'm from another area of europe with lots of tourism, Croatia, and one trick that works here is to take the town everyone talks about, and go one town over, or two towns over.
Does that work with Hallstatt too? I've never been there.
I’d never heard of this place before this thread. Is it really over-visited? It seems like a great place to throw on the next European vacation
Yes it’s basically unlivable. It’s super small and way too many people want in, every day. It’s also a very beautiful spot and I sometimes crave going to that wider area (Salzkammergut).
What did they do for light?
They used wood splinters.
There is a german wikipedia article with pictures.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kienspan
Usually they used spruce wood because it does not create soot.
Out of all of the English-translated Wikipedia articles, the fact that this doesn’t have an English page is wild. I’ll take that on today I think
It might be at least somewhat covered by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatwood - as the sibling comment notes, the article is not well linked.
It seems that the article is not very well linked. It is called "päre" in Finnish: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A4re
IIRC it was torches there seem to be several archaeological finds
This is one of the problems with what the Celts did: they didn't write. And they used a lot of biological material (like leather, wood) which is all gone by now. AFAIK the celts were already "gone" (assimilated / diversified into local tribes) when the Romans (which were writers) arrived. So we don't even have roman writing about the celtic customs.
For example, there is are excavations around https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keltenwelt_am_Glauberg and AFAIK it's still not clear if that area is mostly a castle, or if it was mostly some cultic thing -> nothing written, not even in clay or chiseled into stone.
Similarly, in this article https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_(Arch%C3%A4ologie) that describes the salt mining in Hallstadt since the bronze age there is only so much that they know.
So, did they use torches? They have decayed over this time.
We know however that they had some kind of meat industry at Hallstein. They had plenty of salt, and so they used that to make meat durable. Animal skulls survived the times ...
Beautiful scientific illustrations suggest torches and fires
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26926581.pdf?refreqid=fastl...
"This is one of the problems with what the Celts did: they didn't write."
That is a common misconception. We don't have much in the way of ancient Celtic writing, or even enough, but we do have some . The best known example is the Coligny Calendar. Some of the Celtic peoples used the Greek script and variants. There is also debate about how old Ogham is (although AFAIK there is no evidence of it from Hallstatt and La Tene).
I would not be surprised if some pre-Roman Celtic writing does turn up from this region at some point.
I would expect oil lamps.
Actually it's small wood pieces. They have found that in the caves. It's all good condition because of salt. Also tools, cloths, food... And lots of poo which starts smelling immediately when it gets in contact with humidity air.
It's covered quiet often in German television documentaries