Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – Archaeologists have uncovered grinding stones and grains from early cereals at a Neolithic settlement on the Danish island of Funen, dating back 5,500 years. However, recent research indicates that these stones were not used for grinding cereal grains. Instead of making bread, the inhabitants likely prepared porridge or gruel from these grains.
A grinding stone is characterized by its flat surface, which facilitates grinding with another smaller stone. During excavations at Frydenlund on Strandby Mark, southeast of Haarby on Funen, archaeologists discovered several such stones along with over 5,000 charred grain kernels, including naked barley, emmer wheat, and durum wheat.
If you’re curious about what the settlement on South Funen looked like in the early Neolithic period, here’s an informed guess in the form of a model displayed at Moesgaard Museum. Photo: Niels H. Andersen.
While it might be assumed that these ancient inhabitants ground their cereals into flour for baking bread—a common interpretation of Neolithic grinding stones—this was not the case. An international research team from Denmark, Germany, and Spain analyzed both the grains and the stones. Their findings revealed no evidence of cereal grinding; instead, they found only a few phytoliths on the stones and starch grains originating from wild plants rather than cereals.
“We have not identified the plants the starch grains originate from. We have merely ruled out the most obvious candidates – namely the cereals found at the settlement, which were not ground, as well as various collected species, including hazelnuts,” explains archaeobotanist, PhD Welmoed Out from Moesgaard Museum in a press release.
Together with senior researcher Dr. Phil. Niels H. Andersen, also from Moesgaard Museum, she led the study recently published in the scientific journal Vegetation History and Archaeobotany.
What the grinding stones were used for remains open to interpretation, aside from the fact that they lack clear wear marks from the pushing motions used for grinding grain.
“The trough-shaped querns with traces of pushing movements emerged 500 years later. The grinding stones we studied here were struck with pestles made of stone, like crushing in a mortar. We also found such pestles at the site, resembling rounded, thick stone sausages. However, we have not analyzed them for phytoliths or starch,” explains Niels H. Andersen.
A grinding stone like this one and a further 13 like it − were found by archeologists when they excavated the remains of a settlement from the Early Neolithic Funnel Beaker Culture at Frydenlund, on Strandby Mark southeast of Haarby on Funen. Photo: Niels H. Andersen, Moesgaard Museum.
For the first time, advanced phytolith and starch analyses have been conducted on grinding stones from the earliest farmers in Northern Europe. These findings bolster a hypothesis previously suggested by archaeobotanists and archaeologists in the region: that these early farmers’ diets included not just water and bread but also gruel made from grains, along with berries, nuts, roots, and meat. While they likely consumed water regularly, there is no conclusive evidence of beer brewing in Denmark before the Bronze Age, as noted by Niels H. Andersen.
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However, as the two researchers from Moesgaard Museum emphasize: “This study only involves one settlement. While it supports other findings from the Funnel Beaker Culture, we cannot rule out the possibility of different results emerging when this method is applied to finds from other excavations.”
Written by Conny Waters – AncientPages.com Staff Writer
