A Brief history of the Celts -- MiningIn the year 1734, the body of a man was found in a salt mine near Halstatt, Austria. The man had died in a tunnel collapse many centuries before. The natural preservative characteristics of the salt kept the body in near perfect condition.
by George McCartney
About one hundred years after the discovery of the body, when archaeology was just beginning to be recognized as a scientific study, Georg Ramsauer, the managing director of the mine, became interested in the fledgling science. Though self-taught, he followed all of the proper procedures excavating and documenting over one hundred graves that were part of an extensive Celtic cemetery.
The Celts had mined salt in the Austrian mountains near what is now Salzburg (which means Salt Town) and Halstatt (hal is the Celtic word for salt) for many centuries. Ramsauer’s cemetery discovery and additional finds in the mines have given us samples of pick axes and shovels used in the mines. Beside the tools, leather bags for hauling the salt and hardhats have been found that date back to the eighth century BC.
The helmets are made of hardened leather. The leather was soaked in water to make it more pliable. It was then shaped and rubbed with salt. After it dried, the leather was hardened to some degree, but not hard enough to provide much protection. The helmet was painted with a shellac or lacquer. Four or five coats of the lacquer would make the leather quite hard. This same technique was used in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to make helmets for firefighters. (Again, we see the inventiveness of the early Celts providing methods and technology to modern man.)
Because salt is a natural preservative, it was widely used by the contemporaries of the early Celts. The salt that they mined in Austria was a major trade product for the Celts.
I've toured the salt mine at Salzburg. It's pretty interesting how they used to mine it. They didn't use pick and shovel. They simply flooded a portion of the mine with fresh water, let it sit, drained the brine out of the mine, and then evaporated the water leaving the salt behind. It was a lot less labor intensive than carrying buckets of salt out.