On a 5,500-year-old Neolithic settlement on Funen, a Danish island, archaeologists found ancient grinding stones and early cereal grains. New research shows that the people who lived there didn’t use the stones to produce bread for themselves, but likely turned the grains into porridge or gruel instead.
A grinding stone is a stone with a flat surface that is specifically designed to allow another, smaller stone to be rubbed against it.
Archaeologists discovered 14 stones of this kind during an excavation of the remains of a settlement from the early Neolithic Funnel Beaker culture at Frydenlund, located southeast of Haarby on the island of Funen.
They also found over 5,000 charred grain kernels of naked barley, emmer wheat, and durham wheat, among others.
One might initially think that people living about 5,500 years ago ground their grains into flour and baked bread with it. That’s usually the usual interpretation of the grinding stones found from that time.
But they didn’t.
An international research team from Denmark, Germany, and Spain has conducted a study examining both the grains and the stones, which reveals that the grinding stones were not used for grinding grains.
Scientists studied tiny mineral particles (phytoliths) and starch particles found in tiny holes on the surface of the stones. However, they were surprised to find no signs of grain processing on these stones.
Researchers discovered very few of these tiny particles on the stones, and the ones they found were from wild plants, not from grains of cereal.
“We haven’t been able to pinpoint which specific plants the starch grains came from, but we can rule out some unlikely sources, such as the whole cereals found at the site and certain collected species, including hazelnuts,” says archaeobotanist Dr. Welmoed Out, of Moesgaard Museum.
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The purpose of the grinding stones is still unclear, except that they don’t have visible wear marks from using them to grind grains.
“The T-shaped grinding stones, which show signs of forceful pushing motions, appeared about 500 years later. The stones we analyzed, used for grinding, were struck with stone pestles, similar to those found in mortars holding crushed items. We also discovered such pestles at the site, which resemble rounded, thick stone sausages. That being said, we haven’t tested those pestles for phytoliths or starch,” explains Andersen.
This is the first time a cutting-edge combination of phytolith and starch analysis has been conducted on grinding stones from Northern Europe’s earliest farmers. The results back up a theory that archaeobotanists and archaeologists in other parts of Northern Europe have also proposed after finding evidence of grains cooked into porridge and gruel: that the earliest farmers didn’t live on water and bread, but rather on water and gruel, alongside berries, nuts, roots, and meat.
Yes, they probably drank water. According to Andersen, no conclusive evidence of beer brewing has been unearthed in Denmark prior to the Bronze Age.
However, as the two researchers from the Moesgaard Museum emphasize, “This study is limited to one settlement. Although it confirms other findings from the Funnel Beaker Culture, we cannot eliminate the possibility of different results emerging when this method is applied to excavations from other sites.”
The Funnel Beaker Culture was an early farming culture that existed in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe from approximately 4000–2800 BCE. This culture is notable for bringing agriculture and cattle farming to Scandinavia. The culture is specifically identified by the beakers that were commonly used, which had necks shaped like funnels.
The discovery on Southern Funen marks the most significant find of grinding stones and grains from the Funnel Beaker Culture in the entire region it covered.
The study was conducted as a joint effort by researchers from Moesgaard Museum and Aarhus University in Denmark, Germany’s Kiel University, and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) of Barcelona.
Provided by Aarhus University
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