|
Date: |
|
Description: | Four fragments from possibly three seperate greisen rotary querns dating to the Romano-British period. The fragments are triangular in plan and wedge shaped in section.The handle would have allowed the upper section of the two-part quern to be rotated over the base section, with the grain between the two, so that it was ground into flour.The greisen stone is coarse with prominent mica flakes with ragged edges up to 7 mm across and coarser quartz grains up to 10 mm across set in a finer matrix of quartz and mica with black tourmaline inclusions. The fine-grained inclusion in the broken section of the quern is an original slate xenolith, also now greisenised, in the pre-greisen granite which has trapped an accumulation of tourmaline on one side.Quinnell (2004) illustrates a similar upper stone from a rotary quern, excavated at Trethurgy, on page 145, Fig.70, No.S42, which was broken before the late 4th century AD.Rotary querns were used in a circular motion to grind material. The upper stone is kept in position by means of a wooden spindle fixed in the lower stone and passing right through the upper stone and a handle/cleaver was fixed to the upper stone to rotate the quern. The ground material, i.e., the grain or flour, fell to the sides between the two stones. However the stones would wear down very rapidly and a stone of 5-6 inches would have worn down by half with its size within one year, and so most querns needed to be replaced within two years. Clearly this meant that grain would have been contaminated with ground stone which is evident in the extent of wear on ancient human teeth.A quern survey was conducted in Kent in 1966 by W.S. Penn who built on the earlier work of E.C. Curwen in 1937. Changes in the design of quern stones from the Pre-Roman through the Roman period have been identified which reveal interesting facts about the design of querns. In the Pre-Roman period (100BC) the angle of the grinding surface was circa. 20 degrees, in the Early Roman the angle was circa. 15 degrees, in the Later Roman the angle was 10 degrees, and in the Late Roman the angle was 3 degrees or less.Although these stones are fragmentary, and of course quernstones were in use from prehistory until into the later medieval period, the style and context in which these stones were found supports a Roman date. | Publisher: | http://finds.org.uk | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Identifier: | http://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/r... | Go to resource |
|
More Like this...
-
QUERN
Half of the upper stone…
-
quern
Half of the upper stone…
-
QUERN
Half of the upper stone…
-
QUERN
Fragment of the upper stone…
-
quern
Fragment of the upper stone…
-
-
-
QUERN
Fragment of the lower stone…
-
quern
Fragment of the lower stone…
-
quern
Large weathered granite lower stone…
|