Salt and Power

Salt is indispensable to society, past and present. Human and animal health depend on this resource, as did the preservation of food in the past. Salt was the only means available to preserve and trade foodstuffs essential for the first large towns with thousands of citizens. For central Italy’s early city-states, control over salt resources was crucial. The project aim is to establish how salt was produced before their installation and how salt production kept pace with the rising population of the early states, in particular Rome. We will investigate these questions with an up-to-date methodology to contribute with a historically important case study to the global archaeological and anthropological debate on salt-making and resource control in the context of prehistoric and early state societies. The 4-year project is based at the University of Groningen and funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).