Water and gruel—not bread: Discovering the diet of early Neolithic farmers in Scandinavia
At a Neolithic settlement on the Danish island Funen dating back 5,500 years, archaeologists have discovered both grinding stones and grains from early cereals. However, new research reveals that the inhabitants did not use ...
A grinding stone, as the name suggests, is a stone with a sufficiently flat surface that allows grinding against it with another, smaller stone.
Archaeologists found fourteen such stones 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.
They also found over 5,000 charred grain kernels of naked barley, emmer wheat, and durum wheat, among others.
One might offhand assume that the inhabitants 5,500 years ago ground their cereals into flour and baked bread with it. That has indeed been the typical interpretation of grinding stones from that time.
But they didn't.
An international research team from Denmark, Germany and Spain has now analyzed both the grains and the stones, concluding that the grinding stones were not used to grind cereals.
The researchers examined microscopic mineral plant remains (phytoliths) and starch grains in small cavities on the surfaces of the stones. Surprisingly, they did not find any evidence of grinding of cereals.
The researchers found only a few phytoliths on the stones, and the starch grains they identified came from wild plants instead of cereals.
One of the 14 grindings tones that archaeologists found while excavating a 5,500 years old settlement on the Danish island Funen. A new study reveals that the stones were not used to grind cereal grains. Credit: Niels H. Andersen, Moesgaard Museum
Microscopies of four types of archaeological starch granules from different grinding stones from Frydenlund, magnified 400 times (the white bars represent 20 μm), each photographed in both plane-polarized (left) and cross-polarized light. The starch type shown in image a resembles starch from a grass subfamily of the Panicoideae type; the others are unidentified. Credit: Cristina N. Patús, HUMANE, Barcelona.
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. Credit: Niels H. Andersen.