You can dry the meat out completely and that will have some preserving qualities, especially if you use a really smoky hardwood fire to do it. Still, don't expect it to last very long out in the open, as without the salt it will tend to spoil relatively quickly anyways. Grandad used to talk about taking half a beef and rubbing it down with a lot of black pepper then hanging it near the top of the windmill, where the exposed surface would dry into a skin and seal the meat. This was from his time out in West Texas/Eastern New Mexico. So prepared, a side of beef would last up to a month if the weather stayed warm and dry enough. When mealtime came, they would just lower the beef and hack off a chunk, trim the outside if need be, and fry or roast it up.

Another process I've seen work is to cannery process dried beef. Once the meat has been dried thoroughly, it is put through a pressure canning process which sterilizes the meat in the jar, just like canning other things does. The dried meat stays dry and should last that way for quite a long time, even unrefrigerated. Done this way, no preservatives need to be added to the meat. Something similar is to hermetically seal the meat in an airtight container and then expose it to a high level gamma source. This sterilizes the meat quite well, and should last indefinitely. I've always been an advocate of irradiated food as a survival concept. Great shelf life, quality preserved as well (no thermal breakdown), and significantly safer. Contrary to mass hysteria/media hype, irradiated food is not any more radioactive than food prepared in other methods.

Anyways, traditional recipes all require salt and other preservative agents. It sure is funny how salt seems so deadly these days, considering how much was consumed by folks previously. The amount of salt Grandma used to put in foods would probably gag our blandish palates now.