Content:
Salt has been produced in Hallstatt for 7000 years. This long history of production has given rise to a specialized landscape in which all aspects of life were attuned to salt. This was one of the decisive reasons for the designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
One of the aims of the research carried out by the NHM Vienna and its cooperation partners is to record the prehistoric and imperial mines in their spatial and temporal dimensions, to characterise the impact of mining activity on the surrounding landscape and to reconstruct the human-environment relationship over millennia. Moreover, prehistoric mining activity was interrupted several times by huge landslides. An understanding of these events is necessary to reconstruct the development of this industrial landscape.
An essential tool for achieving these goals is the sampling - coring - of various archives. Coring is used to reconstruct the impact of mining activity on the ecosystem, to record the size of the mining chambers and the dynamics of the landslide events that repeatedly interrupted mining.
In addition to sampling environmental archives, exploratory drilling in the mine is currently the focus of research. This goes beyond anything previously known in archaeological research. With professional mining equipment, core drillings of dozens of metres in length are carried out in a fan shape to record the size, direction and also the filling of the excavation chambers. In order to explore the landslide masses in the Salzberg valley, it was necessary to drill a core borehole more than 40 metres deep. The environmental history of Hallstatt, on the other hand, can be reconstructed by means of sediment cores from lake deposits and from bogs, some of which are over 50 metres deep.
Keywords:
Hallstatt, Environmental Archaeology, Salt mining, Mining Archaeology