The other day, I was thinking about this because I know of salt production around the Mediterranean and other Old World places, but I don't know of any ancient salt sources in North America. Of course, natives could have supplied salt from the ocean and the Great Salt Lake, as this article describes. But I'm particularly curious about how inland peoples, such as the Woodland tribes, found enough salt to be a part of their diet. I hypothesize that salt was a significant trade item that was transported through the extensive Hopewell, Mississippi, and Mesoamerican trade networks, but I don't know since salt is not a good that I recall being discussed when talking about Native American economies.
So, if you were a Woodland, Hopewell, or Great Plains person, how did you get your salt?
As a broader question, how would a hunter-gatherer in any part of the world get enough salt?
Yes, I googled it first. More specifically, I used Google Scholar.
One paper, cited below, describes apparent salt production at Cahokia, which would explain how at least some Hopewell got salt. The second link below shows a map of where principle saline areas could be, and shows a map that early indigenous cultures started around these salt sources, but later expansion would require transporting huge amounts of salt to roughly half the continent. The second link also describes the need for salt increasing after agriculture became the primary subsistence strategy. Why would this be the case? Did the tribes prior to that drink the blood of their kills to get salt? How would a hunter-gatherer get sufficient salt?
Background research I did:
Salt production by boiling briny water at Cahokia (paywalled)
Eastern Woodlands salt production is known, but where, how, and how it was traded are difficult to trace. (paywalled)
Ancient mesoamerican salt production by boiling seawater (paywalled)
Open-air salt mines in San Francisco (paywalled)
A book I couldn't access, but that seems relevant: Brown, Ian W. The Role of Salt in Eastern North American Prehistory. No. 3. Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, 1981.
A book I couldn't access, but that seems relevant: Brown, Ian W. The Role of Salt in Eastern North American Prehistory. No. 3. Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, 1981.
As far as I can tell, a short excerpt of that book is hosted online here
Edit- to your second question of "how would a hunter-gatherer of any part of the world get salt"
The book that I linked mentions a few strategies for getting salt. Including salt-water boiling, gathering salt-impregnated sand, mining rock salt, with long distance trade of salt from these production areas. Another strategy (presumably in areas outside of these trade networks) was burning plants that are known to have high salt-content and consuming the ashes.
In tropical Africa, the situation was similar. Extensive trade networks carrying salt from salt pans in the Sahara or in the Namib deserts existed. However, there is also archaeological and ethnographic evidence of societies outside of these trade networks burning salt-rich vegetation and gaining salt that way.
And from a brief Jstor search, this article says burning sodium-rich tree bark was a source of salt in Papua New Guinea.