Maritime Marnotos? Bread of Salt (Guerra Doce, 2018)

Elvira Guerra Doce has a new paper in 2018* about the original economic currency of the Bell Beaker Phenomenon.  Some of Guerra's ideas here are pretty interesting food for thought.  One of them not so much.  But this first one is really interesting.  So lets' start with a story.

Discriminating Russian oligarchs salt their bread with only one kind of salt and it only comes from the Algarve region of Portugal.  The Portuguese Flor de sal (Times) “Cream of the Salt Pan” is a finishing salt for fine food.  Local salts are for the snotty peasants outside the pallisades and for cow licks.  Since I belong to the second or third category, it wasn't too obvious.

Fleur de sel (Wiki), or any ole' salt generally, is a natural currency for obvious reasons.  It's divisible, transportable, everlasting, and is accepted by everyone.  It has already been proposed by Jonathan Thomas in 2014 that shell beads in the Estramadura region were a kind of proto-currency at this time. See Bead Wampum.  Guerra believes that "white gold" facilitated the development of a Beaker pan-regional phenomenon.

herringbone pattern esparto bag from Portugal (commons)

The Algarve region hasn't exactly been known as Beaker country in the past, but right to the north they fill dump trucks with Beaker pottery.  Guerra Doce believes that the maritime herringbone decoration is a skeuomorph of the traditional, desalinization esparto bags of this region.

Skeuomorph?  Fig 3. Comparison of esparto bag and maritime pot

She believes that somehow the style traveled north by way of fancy salt containers that were of themselves an object of prestige and want.  And why not put a fancy whiskey in a fancy bottle?  Perhaps this skeuomorph copied itself to hillbilly AOC style pottery to create a hybrid pottery form.  Below you can see how a salt container in an esparto bag might have been filled over time.

I'm having a difficult time understanding what "bread of salt" means in Spanish or Portuguese.  It has a similarly weird significance in the Slavic languages as you might treat a guest.  In the Germanic and  Celtic languages there is an association between salt or mixed like *brac and bread, maybe both of which mean break or *bhreg.

In any case, the 'salt loaf' is important for covenant-making, as in the wedding covenant, which is why throughout Europe the bride and bridegroom exchange bride-cake, which is a salt-bread loaf.  There are other customs like the bride throwing salt over the shoulder and whatever.

The deeper question is what this says about Bell Beakers if it were true that Portuguese salt was widely distributed in Europe.  They liked very fine things.  But why?  Would they have valued it for religious reasons, weddings or funerals?  Does currency necessarily mean anything, like the Spanish Dollar?


“La sal y el Campaniforme en la Península Ibérica: Fuente de riqueza, instrumento de poder ¿y detonante del origen del Estilo Marítimo?”. En V.S. Gonçalves (ed.): Sinos e Taças: Junto ao océano e mais longe. Aspectos da presença campaniforme na Península Ibérica. Lisboa: UNIARQ, Estudos e Memórias, 10, pp. 342-353  [Link]

ABSTRACT Among the mechanisms that Beaker individuals might have drawn upon
by the mid-3rd millennium cal BC in order to attain wealth and power, and consequently
acquire a social position, Iberian Beaker groups might have assumed control over the pro
duction and circulation of salt. This paper is aimed at further exploring this issue, and
assessing the possible link between the origin of the Beaker phenomenon, or, more specifically, the Maritime Beaker pots, and the production of salt in the Portuguese Estremadura region.
KEY-WORDS: Bell Beaker. Salt. Circulation. Tagus estuary. Skeuomorphs.

savory spices

*This forthcoming paper was mentioned in 2015 in "The Bell-beaker complex in Portugal: an overview" by Joao Cordoso.  He has this paper coming in 2016, but I'll assume that Guerra had already delayed some of these present ideas.  She did publish this in 2016 "Economic Foundations of Social Supremacy of Beaker Groups"  and this paper concerning salt production and beaker pottery in 2015.  I'm guessing that some ideas were delayed until this paper.