Discovery of 6,000-year-old saltworks

ARCHAEOLOGISTS HAVE found the UK’s first Neolithic saltworks on the Yorkshire coast, dating back nearly 6,000 years.

Dr Stephen Sherlock has been investigating a Neolithic site at Street House, Loftus, North Yorkshire, since 2016, where he has found the remains of a brinestorage pit, with three associated hearths, and other Neolithic artefacts, buried up to three metres deep.

It is thought that the seawater was concentrated into brine using evaporation at the nearest beach at Skinningrove then carried up to the clifftops for further processing by boiling the liquid to create salt crystals.

The Neolithic, he said, was a time of great change when the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were being replaced by farmers who stayed in one spot to grow their crops and rear animals. Keeping cattle alive over winter would need a large amount of fodder and salt was used to preserve the meat. He said: “There are earlier Neolithic sites particularly in the Balkans, Romania and Poland, where they are manufacturing salt as early as 5000, 5300BC. This is the earliest find in the UK and Western Europe.”

The team dug through what it is thought to be a Neolithic domestic dwelling, finding objects including a quern stone, which was used for grinding and a pounder.

Underneath were three areas of intense burning, which Dr Sherlock believes were the hearths, surrounded by fire-reddened, wedge-shaped stones, which could have been props for the oven furniture and ceramic vessels containing the brine.

At least 1,000 saltworks have been found dating back to the Iron Age and 31 in the Bronze Age, but until the Street House find, dated to 3,800BC, there has been no known Neolithic sites.