[0] https://www.markkurlansky.com/books/salt-a-world-history/
Stadt (town) was derived from Statt - here's a good explanation of that: https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/Stadt-Statt...
The name Hallstadt (not the two l letters) means Salt Town.
Or, actually "place". In a lot of location names of germanic origin "stadt" doesn't the current semantics, of being a town with > 10.000. More often than not it just means "place".
And "Hall" is an old term for salt. Many towns related to salt have it in their names, in many places of Germany and Austria. "Halle an der Saale" in Thüringen, Bad Reichenhall (Bayern), Hall im Tirol (Österreich), Schwäbisch-Hall (Baden-Württemberg) etc.
"Hall" is believed to be of celtic origin.
And the double l is important. German is a language where in the written form you look at the letters and you immediately see how it is spoken. A double vocal makes the speed slower, and a double consonant makes the speech faster. So "Halstadt" would be slow Hal (so more emphasize on the "a" instead), and "Hallstadt" would be a fast "Hall", similar in speed like the english "hell": little emphasize on the "a".
Hallstatt as a town is also affected by overtourism, especially since some Asian soap opera used it as a film location. But it is one of the places that is still worth a visit.
For example, there is are excavations around https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keltenwelt_am_Glauberg and AFAIK it's still not clear if that area is mostly a castle, or if it was mostly some cultic thing -> nothing written, not even in clay or chiseled into stone.
Similarly, in this article https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_(Arch%C3%A4ologie) that describes the salt mining in Hallstadt since the bronze age there is only so much that they know.
So, did they use torches? They have decayed over this time.
We know however that they had some kind of meat industry at Hallstein. They had plenty of salt, and so they used that to make meat durable. Animal skulls survived the times ...