A
Millennium of Saltmaking: Prehistoric and Romano-British Salt Production
in the Fenland, ed. TOM LANE & ELAINE L MORRIS
Lincolnshire Archaeological and Heritage
Reports 4. 2001. 509 pp, 106 figs, 16 pls. ISBN 0-948639-32-6 (£31)
The fenland of south Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire
and west Norfolk, with its low rainfall and drying winds, was an ideal
area for the collection of sea salt by evaporation; an industry that
first appears in the last years of the Bronze Age and continued into
the Middle Ages with few changes in technology.
This volume describes the results of substantial excavations
at Cowbit and Morton in Lincolnshire, and Middleton in Norfolk (undertaken
as part of the Fenland Management Programme), together with smaller-scale
work at Langtoft, Market Deeping, Deeping St James, and the Bourne-Morton
Canal in Lincolnshire, Parson Drove in Cambridgeshire, and Nordelph
and Downham West in Norfolk. It assesses the data recovered against
the wider saltern industry defined by the Fenland Survey of 1982-89
(published in East Anglian Archaeology Reports). This is a number of
different projects which were rolled into one monograph when it was
realised that the excavations at Cowbit, Morton and Middleton ‘enabled
identification of the changes and developments in technology and salt
making through almost a millennium’. It required a re-assessment
of other sites identified in the 1980s Fenland Survey, or those that
had produced briquetage and that could be related to well-stratified
collections from excavation. What began as the publication of three
sites, chosen for their period representation, sealed deposits, and
potential organic preservation, became a ‘dated type-series of
briquetage [that] will prove valuable to scholars in the Fenland and
beyond’. While this is an honest admission on Tom Lane’s
behalf, this volume is more than that. It defines the salt-making industry
of the Fens from the late Iron Age to the late Roman period and beyond.
The late Bronze Age and early Iron Age salt industry
was located on the western fen edge and coastal clays in Lincolnshire
on the edge of the salt marsh; early sites are hard to find because
they are well sealed below alluvium. The majority of saltern sites defined
by the Fenland Survey were late Iron Age or ‘Roman’, and
extended out onto sediments in what had been salt lagoon in the earlier
period. They are known from field-walking, for this is now an area of
intensive cultivation; most are seriously damaged by cultivation and
by drainage. It was to sample these sites before it was too late that
the Fenland Management Project excavated Cowbit, Moreton South Drove
and Middleton. The result was to identify specific collections of briquetage
in contexts which were meaningful and which could be closely dated.
Most particularly, hearths / ovens were recovered, as well as settlement
and evaporation tanks and the process of salt recovery was identified.
The result was to take this evidence and reassess of the original Fenland
Survey, refining its results and adding typological phasing. If there
is a flaw, it is that the Fenland Survey did not cover the whole of
the Lincolnshire fens.
This volume is important because it identifies for
the first time the development of salt making technology through time,
and via environmental analyses, is able to place salt making within
the wider fenland economy. Although we still cannot be sure whether
peat or crop-processing waste and brushwood was used to speed evaporation,
the process itself can now be reconstructed with confidence. Sets of
briquetage types change through time, and in which Elaine Morris identifies
chronological and technological developments in a very conservative
industry. Even in a project of this scale there remain problems to be
resolved by future research. The most pressing is the need to understand
the wider context of water management. Salt water was brought to these
sites in channels, it was stored in salt pans for the first stage of
evaporation, and was possibly filtered (at least it was in the medieval
period but evidence is lacking for the Iron Age and Roman period). Lacking
too are the associated settlements (that at Langtoft was badly plough-damaged).
Was this where the evaporation vessels were made? Missing, too, are
the Bronze Age and Saxon salterns, which are neither apparent on the
surface nor recorded by field survey. If the typology of salt production
is established, a research agenda to address these lacunae
has been provided.
What began as the publication of three type-sites
and a review of earlier research is much more than the sum of its parts.
This thought-provoking publication does justice to an essential industry
in England’s largest and least known wetland. Hopefully, it will
not be the final word.
Glyn Coppack
Goxhill
Review Submitted: March 2004
The views expressed in this review are not
necessarily those of the Society or the Reviews Editor.
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