ABSTRACT
Enough is known about salt production and marketing in different parts of the world in historic times for the whole process from extraction to consumption to be considered as an industry, but it may seem foolhardy to attempt to study it in prehistoric times since salt, unlike the materials usually studied by archaeologists, only rarely survives even at the sites where it was obtained. Ethnographic evidence, however, suggests that it is possible to recognize both production and trading, and the results of work in Europe (Alexander 1987) make it useful to apply to west Africa the methods evolved in Europe to analyse prehistoric salt production. The questions and problems raised by such investigations are of some importance, for it seems likely that salt (sodium chloride) is one of the essential, but rare, commodities long needed by human communities and therefore a breaker of the barriers of self-sufficiency (Waldecker 1967, p. 9).
