Early Neolithic Salt Production at Street House, Loftus

Project Co-Investiagtor Steve Sherlock has published two articles on his findings at Street House on the Yorkshire Coast near Loftus. This neolithic salt site is the earliest to be excavated in Western Europe. Read more about his amazing work in the following two articles:

An Early Neolithic Saltern at Street House, Loftus: Excavations in 2022
Antiquity 2021 Vol. 0 (0): 1–22

Evidence for prehistoric salt production in Britain has been confined to the Bronze and Iron Ages. This article presents new evidence for Early Neolithic (3800–3700 BC) salt-working at Street House, Loftus, in north-east England. This deeply stratified coastal site has yielded the remains of a brine-storage pit and a saltern with at least three associated hearths, together with an assemblage of flint and stone tools, ceramic vessel sherds and briquetage. A process of production is suggested and parallels are drawn from contemporaneous European and later British sites. This discovery has the potential to influence future Neolithic studies considering subsistence, early technologies and exchange mechanisms.

The excavation at Street House showing the depth of the stratigraphy, September 2019 (photograph by S.J. Sherlock).

An Early Neolithic Saltern at Street House, Loftus: Excavations in 2022

Excavations at Street House, on the Yorkshire Coast near Loftus continued in the late Summer of 2022, with the aim to examine the foundations for the only Earliest Neolithic salt site to be excavated in Western Europe. The discovery of the site and its wider significance to Neolithic studies was first reported in Antiquity in 2021 (Sherlock 2021).  The excavations this year continued from the horizons examined in the Summer of 2022, with the objective of excavating a furnace that was the principal source of heat for the saltern (fig. 2 & 3). The site has survived in a remarkable condition because it is deep below the ground (c. 2m) and had been sealed by a white clay horizon (of which more later) , thus leaving the main features intact.