Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – Archaeologists have uncovered grinding stones and grains from early cereals at a Neolithic settlement on the Danish island of Funen, relationship again 5,500 years. Nevertheless, current analysis signifies that these stones weren’t used for grinding cereal grains. As an alternative of creating bread, the inhabitants seemingly ready porridge or gruel from these grains.
A grinding stone is characterised by its flat floor, which facilitates grinding with one other smaller stone. Throughout excavations at Frydenlund on Strandby Mark, southeast of Haarby on Funen, archaeologists found a number of such stones together with over 5,000 charred grain kernels, together with bare barley, emmer wheat, and durum wheat.
In the event you’re inquisitive about what the settlement on South Funen seemed like within the early Neolithic interval, here is an knowledgeable guess within the type of a mannequin displayed at Moesgaard Museum. Photograph: Niels H. Andersen.
Whereas it is likely to be assumed that these historical inhabitants floor their cereals into flour for baking bread—a typical interpretation of Neolithic grinding stones—this was not the case. A world analysis workforce from Denmark, Germany, and Spain analyzed each the grains and the stones. Their findings revealed no proof of cereal grinding; as an alternative, they discovered just a few phytoliths on the stones and starch grains originating from wild vegetation somewhat than cereals.
“We’ve got not recognized the vegetation the starch grains originate from. We’ve got merely dominated out the obvious candidates – specifically the cereals discovered on the settlement, which weren’t floor, in addition to numerous collected species, together with hazelnuts,” explains archaeobotanist, PhD Welmoed Out from Moesgaard Museum in a press release.
Along with senior researcher Dr. Phil. Niels H. Andersen, additionally from Moesgaard Museum, she led the examine not too long ago printed within the scientific journal Vegetation Historical past and Archaeobotany.
What the grinding stones have been used for stays open to interpretation, apart from the truth that they lack clear put on marks from the pushing motions used for grinding grain.
“The trough-shaped querns with traces of pushing actions emerged 500 years later. The grinding stones we studied right here have been struck with pestles fabricated from stone, like crushing in a mortar. We additionally discovered such pestles on the website, resembling rounded, thick stone sausages. Nevertheless, we now have not analyzed them for phytoliths or starch,” explains Niels H. Andersen.
A grinding stone like this one and an additional 13 prefer it − have been discovered by archeologists after they excavated the stays of a settlement from the Early Neolithic Funnel Beaker Tradition at Frydenlund, on Strandby Mark southeast of Haarby on Funen. Photograph: Niels H. Andersen, Moesgaard Museum.
For the primary time, superior phytolith and starch analyses have been carried out on grinding stones from the earliest farmers in Northern Europe. These findings bolster a speculation beforehand urged by archaeobotanists and archaeologists within the area: that these early farmers’ diets included not simply water and bread but in addition gruel constituted of grains, together with berries, nuts, roots, and meat. Whereas they seemingly consumed water often, there is no such thing as a conclusive proof of beer brewing in Denmark earlier than the Bronze Age, as famous by Niels H. Andersen.
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Nevertheless, as the 2 researchers from Moesgaard Museum emphasize: “This examine solely entails one settlement. Whereas it helps different findings from the Funnel Beaker Tradition, we can not rule out the potential for completely different outcomes rising when this methodology is utilized to finds from different excavations.”
Written by Conny Waters – AncientPages.com Employees Author
