Albinetz, Constantin et al.: Catalogul expoziţiei Drumul Sării (Satu Mare, 2018)

Rezumat în limba engleză

Exhibition catalogue Salt road - Country road

(Extraction and distribution of salt in the Someş River Basin from the 2nd millennium BC

to the 18th century AD)

At first glance the economy comprises two large areas: production and consumption. However, a third element is squeezed in between the two, being as vigorous as a stream and easy to recognize at first glimpse: trade.

Fernand Braudel, Les jeux de l ’échange

The goals of the exhibition

Based on Braudel’s expressive stream metaphor meant to describe the impetuous development of trade in the early modem European society, the present exhibition sets out to outline various aspects of the economic trade carried out in a cultural and historical environment that seems at first glance to be much less favourable than the one referred to by the aforementioned French historian. The context of precapitalist trade considered in the exhibition entitled

Salt road- Country road is far more tedious to unravel mainly because of two aspects: firstly it includes a much older period - which is always harder to reconstruct - and secondly, it deals with an area relatively poor in terms of historical sources.

With regard to this region of Eastern Central Europe, the underlying socio-economic paradigm states that we are dealing with less dynamic conditions in which capitalism failed to develop at a comparable pace with its place of origin, i.e. Western Europe. The recent archaeological discoveries presented in the exhibition and associated with certain reinterpreted historical data, offer however a rather more complex perspective. The region comprising northern Transylvania and the north-eastern part of the Tisa Plain (corresponding to the north-eastern part of the Alföld) was marked by a flow of commercial trade, which according to the recent archaeological findings maintained a high degree of intensity for three millennia. The intensity of this economic flow is such that its major component, i.e. the salt commerce

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