Salzberg High Valley, Hallstatt

Rich on salt, long before Rome

Around 650 BC the salt miners of Hallstatt were among the wealthiest communities in Europe. In a high valley about 300 metres above Lake Hallstatt, in the limestone Alps of the Salzkammergut, they cut rock salt from galleries up to 200 metres deep.

The work was hard and it involved everyone. Women and children, some of them eight years old or younger, carried heavy loads of salt out of the galleries on their shoulders, with straps and carrying poles. The miners lit the tunnels with bundles of pine splints and cut the salt with bronze-headed picks on wooden handles.

What they wore survives too: woollen cloth woven in coloured checks and bands, fur caps and leather shoes.

A cemetery that named an age

On a gentle slope near the mouth of the valley the miners buried their dead. Between about 800 and 350 BC some 5,000 to 6,000 people were laid to rest here, some cremated, others laid out on their backs with their arms at their sides.

The richest graves hold bronze vessels, jewellery, goods traded from far across Europe and some twenty swords of bronze or iron, a few of them with elaborate ivory hilts.

In 1846 Johann Georg Ramsauer, who ran the salt mine, found the cemetery. He excavated about a thousand graves, and his records remain one of the best documentations from the early years of archaeology. The finds were so rich and so typical of their time that the site gave its name to a whole era: the Hallstatt period of the early Iron Age.

Where the miners lived is unknown

For all the finds underground, one question is still open. No Iron Age settlement has been found in the high valley, and nobody knows where the miners lived or what stood at the mine entrances. Any picture of their buildings is a reconstruction.

Much of what visitors see today came far later. The Rudolfsturm, the tower above the valley mouth, was built in 1282 to 1284, and the village of Hallstatt, crowded onto the lakeshore below, did not exist at all.

Why Austrians start their history here

Every Austrian pupil meets Hallstatt early, and the name reaches far beyond Austria: archaeologists across Central Europe speak of the Hallstatt culture.

The salt mine is described as the oldest working salt mine in the world, and the valley lies at the heart of the Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut cultural landscape, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997.

For Austrians it is the deepest root of their story. Long before the Romans, a community in their mountains grew rich on salt, and it was salt, not gold, that filled its graves with treasure from across a continent.

Sources

• Wikipedia (de): Hallstatt (Archäologie)
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• Wikipedia (en): Hallstatt culture