Briquetage refers to a type of midden, or refuse deposit, which consists of massive dumps of pottery sherds resulting as a by product from the production of salt. Before the development and spread of iron or other metals (and well afterward for that matter), salt production involved the creation of many many pottery vessels, in which salt-infused water called brine, or a briny paste made from salt water, was placed to allow it to thoroughly dry and form into salt cakes.
Once the cakes were formed, the pottery was broken, and the cake extracted for easy (and nearly weightless) transportation to trade partners. Thus, every time a cake of salt was formed, a pot was broken, and the salt producer would dump the sherds in a midden. Salt cakes store well, so for everyday use for her own household, a salt producer might have had to break dozens of pots. If the production level was even at a moderate level, the sherd middens rapidly became quite large, and if the production was continuing over months or years, rather than at a temporary household-level craft specialization level, the briquetage midden could grow to be quite enormous.
Briquetage and Archaeology
Briquetage middens are easily identified on archaeological sites, because they consistently include only potsherds from one or two types of vessels, and the vessels are generally remarkably similar, with elements that may suggest mass production. Pottery vessels in the briquetage middens are coarse, fairly porous and plain, although some decorative elements may be used to form the resulting cakes. The coarseness of the pot allows a moderate amount of air in to speed the drying process, while keeping the brine within the confines of the pot while the water evaporated.
The briquetage middens consistently lack other kinds of refuse normally found in middens. In a typical multiple-use midden, archaeologists have found plant residues, animal bones, and broken or spent artifacts of many different types and materials, even human remains. Briquetage middens are typically quite uniform.
Finally, recent methodologies have identified microscopic amounts of briny residues left behind on the interiors of the pottery sherds.
World Wide Briquetage
In some places in the world, even after the widespread availability of metal, such as in medieval Europe, pottery vessels for creating salt cakes were still preferred to metal pans, and some briquetage middens are known to have been used well into the 17th century.
The largest briquetage middens in the world, such as at the River Seille in France and the Zhongba site on the Gangjing River in Chongqing, China, consist of literally millions of potsherds representing centuries of production. The Iron Age River Seille deposits include four million square meters of briquetage in hills up to 500 meters long. The briquetage midden at Zhongba has no less than four urban settlements built atop its vast deposits.
Sources
This glossary entry is a part of the About.com guide to Salt Production, and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
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Guerra-Doce E, Delibes de Castro G, Abarquero-Moras FJ, del Val-Recio JM, and Palomino-Lázaro ÁL. 2011. The Beaker salt production centre of Molino Sanchón II, Zamora, Spain. Antiquity 85(329):805-818.
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