Interpreting Prehistoric Eastern U.S. Salt Production Using Ethnographic Analogy

Summary

The manufacture of salt by agricultural peoples in the Eastern United States has been documented at dozens of salt springs. Archaeologists have produced detailed inventories of specialized features, vessels, and other tools common to these sites and have mapped variations in their distributions, but the precise processes in which these tools were applied, particularly in the Early and Middle Mississippian periods, remains largely speculative. This paper situates the evidence within the limited possible iterations of the evaporative process and in recent ethnographies of salt-making to construct a set of plausible, testable explanations for the process in the prehistoric Eastern U.S.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

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