Methods for calculating brine evaporation rates during salt production

This paper presents an overview of major trends and contributions of faunal studies to our understanding of Neanderthal and anatomically modern human lifeways and adaptations in the Near East. Prior to the 1980s, Near Eastern Middle Palaeolithic zooarchaeology served primarily as an adjunct discipline, a largely palaeontological means of reconstructing palaeoenvironments and as a tool for determining the relative age of sites. Faunal reports were often exceedingly brief, not uncommonly amounting to little more than species lists, and often relegated to an appendix. This technical and largely supportive role, though important and one that continues to make valuable contributions today, began to broaden in scope in the 1980s and 1990s, largely in response to Lewis Binford's provocative ideas about scavenging by early hominins at Olduvai Gorge, together with the infusion of taphonomic approaches and methodologies, also pioneered in sub-Saharan Africa, by CK Brain, Kay Behrensmeyer, Richard Klein, Henry Bunn,...

Middle Palaeolithic subsistence in the Near East

The control of fire and the beginning of cooking were important developments in the evolution of human food ways. The cooking techniques available to our ancestors for much of the Pleistocene would have been limited to simple heating and roasting. The next significant change in culinary technology came much later, when humans learned to wet-cook (i.e., “boil,” sensu lato), a suite of techniques that greatly increased the digestibility and nutritional worth of foods. Most archaeologists assume that boiling in perishable containers cannot pre-date the appearance of fire-cracked rock (FCR), thus placing its origin within the Upper Paleolithic (UP) and linking it to a long list of innovations thought to have been introduced by behaviorally modern humans. This paper has two principal goals. The first is to alert archaeologists and others to the fact that one can easily and effectively boil in perishable containers made of bark, hide, leaves, even paper and plastic, placed directly on the fire and without using heated stones. Thus, wet-cooking very likely pre-dates the advent of stone-boiling, the latter probably rep resenting the intensification of an already existing technology. The second goal is to suggest that foragers might have begun stone-boiling if they had to increase the volume of foods cooked each day, for example, in response to larger average commensal-unit sizes. Enlarged hide and bark containers are inherently flimsy, and at some point it would have become necessary to support them in a pit. Moreover, since hides shrink when filled with water and heated, stone-boiling, by removing the container from direct contact with flames, may have extended its use-life, thereby freeing up valuable hides for other purposes such as clothing and shelter. To date, the evidence that is available for wet-cooking prior to the UP remains limited and largely circumstantial. Birch tar mastic found on several Middle Paleolithic (MP) stone tools shows that Neanderthals already by the late Middle Pleistocene were using birch bark, an ideal material for making cooking vessels. And they had ample access to hides and paunches, both of which also make serviceable containers. The best evidence at present for pre-UP wet-cooking are starch grains extracted from dental calculus of a Shanidar Neanderthal. These grains are distorted in a manner that is suggestive of cooking in the presence of moisture. Obviously, this evidence does not prove that Neanderthals, or earlier hominins, were in fact wet-cooking but, given the simplicity of the technology and the wide availability of suitable container materials, it seems highly likely. Scholars interested in the evolution of human diet and culinary technology need to be aware of this likelihood, and begin to focus their collective efforts on finding innovative ways to “see” wet-cooking in the Paleolithic record.

When Did Humans Learn to Boil

More recently, a new approach has been developed by G. W. Skinner to explain the deployment of resources and social action in terms of special spatial patterns. Skinner has greatly influenced China scholars to reconsider spatial organization and its implications for the evolution of society. He believed that spatial aggregation (or "space") is a key aspect in explaining historical behavior. Therefore, he advanced three spatial concepts for the study of China; macroregions, cores, and peripheries. This essay argues that although Skinner's concepts are intuitively appealing, some are too vague to be tested, while others are not supported by the economic and demographic facts they claim to represent. More specifically, of Skinner's three concepts the macroregion proved the most difficult to test. Where we could test it, the concept did not accurately identify China's economic resource patterns. Further, while the core and periphery concepts proved extremely amenable to testing, their results did not correctly represent the location of China's resources. We should note that,

The Spatial Approach to Chinese History: A Test

Guangdong has made impressive achievements in economic growth during the reform period and has been one of the fast growing provinces in China since 1978. However, regional inequality of income in Guangdong has intensified during the same period. A huge income gap between the Pearl River Delta Area (PRDA) and the peripheral regions has been found in this province.

Regional inequality in Guangdong Province

Ch'ing China's salt supply was widely dispersed, although more than four-fifths of the salt produced came from the seacoast. There were six sources of salt: seawater, salt lakes, brine wells, saline rock, gypsum mines and salty earth. Boiling and solar evaporation were the major production methods. The simplicity of the boiling method favored its wide use. Nevertheless, the solar evaporation eventually took the place of the boiling method, as fuels became scarcer in most salt-producing areas. A better natural resource base stimulated the production of salt along the North China seacoast to a greater extent than elsewhere in the nation. The increasing trend of salt production paralleled China's population growth. Geographical changes in salt production also reflected regional differences in this growth.

Tao-Chang Chiang

Papers

The production of salt in china, 1644–1911