Iron Age salt-mining complex found beneath Hallstatt in Austria | Hacker News Reader

Iron Age salt-mining complex found beneath Hallstatt in Austria

archaeologymag.com

144 pointsjanandonly63 comments

I 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/

Can confirm, it's a fantastic book!

This is a good one. Also Cod gives a rather interesting deviation from the common idea of how the North Atlantic got explored/discovered.

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.

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.

they go just for day trips there that's the problem

Austrian here, nope. I mean there are similar lakeside beauties in Austria, but nothing has quite this combination of interesting topology, ancient history and atmosphere. If that combination doesn't make you excited, then it is probably okay to go to some other place instead.

That being said of the 3 times I was there during the past decade, it was only bad one time, but that was high season/winter and we booked the date because of a family event that we didn't want to move. That was bareable still since most Hallstatt tourists tend to be day-trippers that are bussed in and out and if you stay over night you get some chance to walk around late or early without a million people in an narrow alley.

Like with every touristy area it pays off to investigate which ones are the less popular weeks of the year to visit (hard to do that sometimes in Croatian, especially if you're there for a swim).

the whole area is cool but hallstatt is unique. i spent a few days near there last summer and rented a bicycle and rode around to other villages and small towns and lakes and it's all very nice

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).

dozens of busses every day, but Hallstatt is very small

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

Anybody that visits near the Wieliczka Salt Mine (outside Krakow) must take a tour. It's incredible. Lick the walls (they are sanitary). My favorite part was the craftsmanship - chandeliers, relief of the Last Supper, etc entirely formed by unskilled workers hands in their spare time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieliczka_Salt_Mine

I think it's unfair to call the workers unskilled - but accurate that professional sculptors were not retained to execute the works.

It is an incredible place. We visited by chance with a spare day in Krakow and had no idea what to expect. It is both historically fascinating and visually stunning to experience!

- The unskilled workers didn't wash their hands.

- How do you know you aren't licking the same spot as the guy before you?

1. Them and their germs are long dead

2. The salt will kill the germs, but also... it's huge... you can find a spot.

It was also quite long operating, one of the longest continuous - seven centuries. It started in 13th century and finished in 1996.

Only sad part is they don't let you ride the mine cart boat thing because a group of drunk soldiers drowned using it.

Also, I didn't find evidence of this after a quick search, but IIRC the miners have been bringing people since at least the 19th century. It's great fun.

I've seen several "mine cathedrals" now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Cathedral_of_Zipaquir%C3%... and a few more listed here: https://www.historyhit.com/beautiful-subterranean-salt-mines...

> Lick the walls (they are sanitary).

If everyone licked the wall, wouldn't they lick away the cathedral and make it into a shapeless cave?

The name Halstatt seems to mean Salt Town.

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".

The not/note typo strikes again, it reverses the meaning of a phrase.

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.

Which is really curious. Shortly after the printing press was invented, grammar books were one of the most popular genres as people learned to read but it took centuries more for languages to get standardized and nearly four hundred years for dictionaries to appear.

Dictionaries, in one form or another, are far older than the 16th century, far older than printing press. Word lists, particularly those translating words from one language to another, have been around for thousands of years. Arabic dictionaries exist from the 8th century. And there were catholic/latin dictionaries (alphabetical word lists) in the 13th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholicon_(1286)

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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).

The German spelling reform was also an international agreement by Germany, Austria, Lichtenstein and Switzerland.

Can you imagine trying to organize a spelling reform agreement between the US, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Philippines, the UK, Germany and Canada?

Australia, New Zealand, Ireland etc

A few month ago I told my wife half joking that the rules to change the spelling so a Spanish speaker can read German enter in a napkin. (I think I was ignoring ä, ö, ü, that need a longer explanation, but are deterministic too.)

"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.

> "ich" vs "ach"

Front vs back vowels. Not much different from "cinco", "gigolo", or "gelato"/"ragazza".

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...

Thanks! Learned a lot

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

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.

The German Wikipedia article on Salzburg (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salzburg#Namensgebung) has an extensive section on the name. It mentions that salt mining in Hallein only started when Salzburg already had its name, so the name is either connected to Reichenhall or derived from the river Salzach on which it's located. Despite the area being undeniably salty, Salzburg itself didn't have a salt mine or play an important role in the salt trade.

Thanks. I suspect that wiki article (and/or it's source) might be inaccurate though. The Hallein salt mine's own webpage say it was active many years before that. https://www.salzwelten.at/en/salzburg/discover-experience

What did they do for light?

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

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 ...

"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.

Beautiful scientific illustrations suggest torches and fires

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26926581.pdf?refreqid=fastl...

IIRC it was torches there seem to be several archaeological finds

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 seems that the article is not very well linked. It is called "päre" in Finnish: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A4re

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.

Hello

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