Archaeologists are nearer to cracking the thriller of an historical salt mine which homes the mummified stays of miners.
The ‘Saltmen’ within the Chehrābād salt mine of Douzlākh, Iran, date again to Persia’s Achaemenid Dynasty from 550 to 330 BC. Miners had been “exceptionally” preserved after being buried alive, nonetheless frozen of their dying positions with some ‘screaming’.
Of the eight mummified Saltmen unearthed, most date again to the age of the Achaemenid empire, which stretched from Egypt to the Indus River Valley, in areas that are actually a part of Pakistan and India.
“Within the case of the salt mummies,” as paleo-pathologist Dr Lena Öhrström and her co-authors put it, “the mummification course of was induced by salt.”
The moisture-absorbing impact of the mine’s salt deposits, in response to the College of Zurich’s Mummy Research Group, dehydrated the Saltmen till they had been “naturally” mummified.
“The ensuing dehydration inhibits bacterial development and arrests decomposition,” Dr Öhrström and her group defined of their 2021 research for the journal PLoS One.
However a brand new research means that the primary individuals to mine the area’s salt might date practically over 4 thousand years prior, primarily based on settlements unearthed close by.
The researchers pulled collectively information from 18 close by archaeological dig websites, relationship “from prehistory to the Islamic interval”, hoping to find out how far again in human historical past salt mining and extraction first started.
They’re satisfied that the simply accessible and mineable salt mountain in Douzlākh would have had a central function within the financial system of rural communities.
Nonetheless, regardless of the settlements being discovered, a few of which date again to five,000 BC, there’s little proof to show they had been mining salt.
As a result of lack of proof, they’ve been left to theorise, asking: “Does the dearth of proof relate to a kind of underground exploitation that’s totally different from floor salt assortment?
“Or, does it relate to the dearth of administrative and governance constructions for the exploitation of salt?”