Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [10]
Japan did not make the transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society until the very end of the Neolithic period, when, around 2200 BCE, successive waves of immigrants from the Korean Peninsula and China brought rice cultivation to the islands. It was only thereafter that the first salts were regularly produced in Japan, using fire to evaporate seawater or brine-soaked sand or kelp in earthenware vessels. The Japanese archipelago has no rock salt deposits of its own, and its damp, relatively cool climate is inhospitable to the production of sea salt. Salt, the cornerstone of cultures built on farming and raising animals, was essential to the stability of Neolithic economies, and Japan’s lack of local salt may well have been the stumbling block that kept Japanese tribes from settling down into agrarian societies thousands of years earlier.
Ancient India had access to voluminous supplies of rock salt from deposits such as the Salt Range just south of the Himalayas, in addition to sea salt from the Rann of Kutch, a marshy region on the west coast, and hundreds of other sites along the subcontinent’s vast, often arid coastlines. The rishis, divine poets and scribes of Hindu lore, sang of the rock salt kala namak. Today, kala namak is a staple of northern Indian cuisine and a favorite of traditional ayurvedic healers, who claim that it possesses therapeutic qualities.
Salt production has been ubiquitous for millennia along the coasts of eastern Africa, where salt is scraped from the mud or boiled from the sand of tidal marshes. One of the most famous routes ever to be used for the salt trade was the path crossing the Sahel to link the salt mines of northern Mali’s Sahara Desert to customers in the heavily populated, salt-poor regions of sub-Saharan West Africa. It was here that in ancient times Tuareg and Berber traders transported salt to be exchanged for gold. This trade would become the foundation of three great African empires: the Songhay, the Ghana, and the Mali.
The Mali Empire prospered as much from its salt mines as for its vast supplies of gold. Pound for pound, salt was worth as much as the precious metal or more. Salt, like gold, was taxed across the board, and often exchanged directly as currency. The famous Arab traveler Ibn Battuta visited Mali in 1352 and reported on the city of Taghaza, the home of the largest salt mine in the Mali Empire. Today both city and mine have been swallowed by the desert, and not a trace of either remains, though salt continues to be mined in Taoudenni, a city that drifts like the sands of the Sahara as the mining population follows the veins of salt ribboned across that desiccated landscape.
In Mesoamerica, archeological investigations have uncovered evidence of solar evaporated salt production dating back to the second millennium BCE, and evidence of fire evaporated brine from the second half of the first millennium BCE. An estimated two million people inhabited the Guatemalan and Mexican highlands at the height of the Mayan Empire, around 700 CE, and great saltworks on the Yucatan Peninsula’s coastal salt lagoons and along the coasts of Central America may have manufactured thirty tons of salt or more a day to feed them. Incan salt was both mined and evaporated in the Andes; and in highland Ecuador, before the arrival of Europeans, salt was widely produced by boiling saline spring water. Where possible, salt production appears to have been performed on a household scale throughout the New World. North American tribes taught European settlers their salt-making techniques. Among their pupils was Daniel Boone, who needed salt to treat beaver pelts.
For most of history, the story has been much the same wherever salt was produced: whoever controlled salt making had the economic upper hand. Salt became not just a means to achieve power, but a symbol of it. During