Iron Age salt miners ate blue cheese and beer

Fungi found in ancient feces recovered from the Hallstatt salt mines in Austria are the earliest evidence of people eating blue cheese and drinking beer in Iron Age Europe.

The salt mountains of Hallstatt in the Eastern Alps have been mined since at least the 14th century B.C. and mining has been continuous ever since. Excavations have unearthed multiple layers dense with evidence of mining activity during the early Iron Age (800-400 B.C.). Objects include wooden tools, fur, hide, wool and textile fragments, ropes and beautifully preserved human feces. These paleofeces, rapidly desiccated in the dry, perpetually cool and salty air of the underground mines, can be radiocarbon dated and analyzed to discover what people ate, what parasites they had, details about the microflora and fauna of their digestive system.

This study looked at three samples of paleofeces from the Bronze Age and Iron Age layers of the Hallstatt mine, and one sample from the 18th century. Even though the samples had been excavated as far as back as 1983, researchers were able to retrieve DNA and proteins that were almost entirely undamaged thanks to the rapid desiccation of the paleofeces in the salt mine environment.

Analyses found that all four samples came from four individual males. Researchers tested for 15 of the most abundant species found in the guts of modern-day populations. They found 13 of them, 11 of them more prevalent in non-Westernized populations. Microscopic analysis of the dietary components found that the Bronze Age sample was heavy on cereals — barley, spelt, emmer, millet. The Iron Age samples were also cereal-rich, with beans, opium poppy seeds, crab apples, cranberries rounding out the diet. Molecular analysis of DNA and protein biomolecules confirmed the presence of the cereals, seeds and fruit varieties and also revealed the presence of walnuts. The plants were supplemented by beef and pork.

It was one of the Iron Age samples that contained the biggest surprise: a high abundance of DNA and proteins from Penicillium roqueforti and Saccharomyces cerevisiae fungi. The research team confirmed these were not contaminants but are indeed of ancient origin, and were used in deliberate fermentation to produce a non-Roquefort blue cheese and beer. Had the fermentation been spontaneous, there would have been yeast species present in the paleofeces that are not there. Wooden cradles have also been unearthed in the mines that are believed to have been used as cheese strainers.

“The Hallstatt miners seem to have intentionally applied food fermentation technologies with microorganisms which are still nowadays used in the food industry,” [the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies’ Frank] Maixner says.

The findings offer the first evidence that people were already producing blue cheese in Iron Age Europe nearly 2,700 years ago, he adds.

The study has been published in the journal Current Biology and can be read in its entirety here.

4 thoughts on “Iron Age salt miners ate blue cheese and beer

  1. It is strange to think that you stop work to have a poop, little imagining that 2700 years later someone would be examining it to see what you had for breakfast.

  2. So far –just to make that clear– I have not seen any of this myself, nor am I from Austria, but there is a lot to be seen.

    Apparently, even one of the miners had been found (i.e. himself “meat procured”, but already in the 18th century, if I remember correctly).

    The salt production over there is 7000+ years old, and was later also used for meat procurement on an almost “industrial” scale. German speakers –and those with translating tools at hand– may want to have a look at:

    de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_(Archäologie)

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt#Iron_Age

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_Museum

    upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/44/Fundaktenarchiv_PA_NHM_Wien_Abb_Salz-Reich_2008_Seite_128_1.tif/lossless-page1-992px-Fundaktenarchiv_PA_NHM_Wien_Abb_Salz-Reich_2008_Seite_128_1.tif.png

    :hattip:

    For those in Vienna:

    nhm-wien.ac.at/en/exhibitions/permanent_exhibitions/mezzanine_level/hall_11-13_prehistory

    ———
    “Hall 12” is entirely dedicated to the prehistoric salt mine and settlement of Hallstatt (Upper Austria). For 7,000 years humans have been mining salt in this high valley in the Austrian Alps, and for generations scientists and researchers from the NHM have been excavating the prehistoric salt mine and burial site. Hallstatt is the oldest salt mine in the world and Austria’s most important archeological site. Salt was mined here as early as the Stone Age – probably from brine sources with a high concentration of salt. These early attempts to access this valuable “white gold” form part of the exhibition alongside the larger salt mines found in the Bronze and Iron Ages as well as the industrial salt production of the 21st century. Documents reveal that as early as the Middle Bronze Age around 1550 BC salt mining was a flourishing industry in Hallstatt. The next boom was experienced during the Early Iron Age. Unique finds dating back thousands of years – such as Bronze Age carry sacks, the oldest surviving wooden staircase in Europe, material fragments, tools, and pine chips – are displayed and explained in films and animations. A 3D model show visitors how mining in Hallstatt has changed over many millennia. The high valley above the Hallstatt lake was used in prehistoric times by miners and their families as a place to live and work. Following the sensational finds in the burial site, the Early Iron Age period in Europe (8th– 4th centuries BC) became known as the “Hallstatt period”.
    ———

  3. Although I live in the new world, my ancestory is stright from the Alps. And my school aged children LOVE blue cheese. Eat it straight out of the container. Stinky, smelly blue cheese that smells to high heaven, the worse it smells, the more they like it. They have a Koren friend who smelled it once and thought she was going to throw up. But my kids, even at age 4 and 5, just love blue cheese, can’t stop eating it. That blue cheese gene from our ancestors goes back a long, long way.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.