716 mining, quarrying, and salt making: introduction ▶ mining, quarrying, and salt making introduction During the medieval era people revealed what minerals they valued by how much effort and risk they put into finding them This may be best illustrated by salt Salt makes food tastier, but it also is an essential nutrient, without which people cannot live Only small amounts of salt are needed to keep people alive, but when even small amounts are unavailable, people will sacrifice much to obtain it During most of the medieval period people in western and central Africa had to trade for their salt The salt came to them from two places: one was by sea, and the other was from the Sahara desert Medieval Africans who lived south of the Sahara paid an equal amount by weight in gold for salt This was not just from having plenty of gold; by then the gold miners had exhausted most surface sources of gold and would have put themselves at risk digging into the earth to follow veins of gold By trading gold for salt, they were trading life for life In China and India governments monopolized salt production and taxed the sales of salt even after they had sold the salt to merchants In both regions, people paid the taxes because they had to have the salt; in both regions people deeply resented the government for taking advantage of them in this way There were three basic sources of salt: the sea, rock salt left from ancient oceans, and underground brine deposits such as those in China Most salt in medieval times came from the sea, usually from a process of drying out trapped seawater The effectiveness of this process varied considerably, because the salt content of water varied greatly, from about percent in the Baltic Sea to about percent in the Dead Sea Rock salt was gathered from surface deposits, from digging mines, and in Africa from the use of water to cause salt to rise out of the ground The brine deposits of China were so valued that the Chinese invented a new technology to get at them: deep borehole drilling In the process, they discovered natural gas Stone seems to have been of value everywhere, and many medieval people had a sophisticated understanding of different kinds of stone and to what uses they could be put For instance, medieval Australians preferred granite for their tools and weapons, but they used sandstone to sharpen their granite tools Blocks of stone were used for construction in many cultures The value cultures placed on stone for construction can be seen in their determination to free stone blocks from quarries In the Americas and Oceania people often worked with only stone tools to free the stone blocks, requiring long and strenuous effort on their part In Great Zimbabwe, Europe, and elsewhere fire was used A stone surface would be heated, and then water would be splashed on it, the sudden cooling causing the stone to crack or shatter In India and Ethiopia metal chisels were used to free and shape stones in quarries In both India and Ethiopia a special form of quarrying flourished in the early medieval era: Stonemasons quarried entire temples, churches, and monasteries out of stone Many metals could be found in surface deposits in ancient times, but most of these deposits were gone by medieval times In some areas, such as Japan and China, it was possible to pan for gold in streams, and many a peasant did so in order to supplement his or her income In North America huge deposits of copper made it readily accessible to simple digging throughout medieval times, but in other areas it became something to be sought after in tunnels, dug to follow the copper deposits through the earth In South America miners of gold, silver, and copper worked in cramped, narrow tunnels scores of yards within mountainsides, using tools of deer horn—a perilous and grinding effort eased in the Inca Empire only by liberal sick-leave policies and by mining only during warm months In Europe and Asia miners risked cave-ins and floods The ancient Romans had developed an effective system for eliminating water by using waterwheels on which people treaded, turning the wheels and the buckets attached to them to raise water up from one level to the next until it could be poured outside In Japan hand pumps were used to raise water to the surface, where it was put to use sluicing ore downhill toward smelting furnaces The risks were great in digging into the earth, and slaves were often forced to the work, or local populations were drafted to work government mines Still, it seems that almost everywhere metal was known to exist, individual entrepreneurs risked their lives to find metal, because metal could improve their lives enough to make risking their lives seem worthwhile Africa by Flordeliz T Bugarin and Bradley Skeen During the medieval period in Africa a wealth of different minerals shaped historical events, culture, and the everyday lives of various peoples The mining, quarrying, and processing of these resources brought economic opportunities to various regions and affected local communities, trade routes, and political relations Mineral abundance led to the development of market centers, the birth of new cities, and the appearance of groups of individuals with specialized skills The production of valued commodities, such as salt, gold, iron, copper, and bronze, stimulated vast social and economic changes throughout Africa Salt is said to have been as priceless as gold during the medieval era Some believe that salt was the monetary equivalent of gold and that it was exchanged measure for measure