Some Considerations on Salt exploatation at Trieste Karst in Prehistory
Some Considerations on Salt exploatation at Trieste Karst in Prehistory

Summary/Abstract: Two recent Symposia – Early symbolic systems for communication in southeast Europe (Karlovo, Bulgaria, April 2002) and Settlements and settling from Prehistory to the Middle Ages (Pula, Croatia, November 2002) – gave me the opportunity to revise the results of the studies on the Trieste Karst carried out since the early 1990s from the viewpoint of the motivations that might explain the rather intensive use of a relatively high number of caves in prehistory. Among the many interesting elements that have emerged from these studies, the evidence for pastoralism is undoubtedly the most relevant to the subject, and has an almost certain correlate in the significant presence of rare, foreign valuables. But these same elements are often mentioned in the archaeological literature as indirect indicators, with others, of salt exploitation / production – and saline have represented one of the basic economic resources of the north-eastern Adriatic coasts since at least the beginning of the Venetian Republic in the 8th century AD till few decades ago, or even to the present in certain cases.

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