Water and gruel – not bread: Discovering the diet of early Neolithic farmers in Scandinavia
At a 5,500-year-old Neolithic Danish settlement, archaeologists found grinding stones and early cereal grains. However, the stones weren't used to grind the grains for bread. Instead, the inhabitants likely prepared porridge or gruel from the cereals.
Aarhus University
image:
One of the 14 grindings tones that archeologists 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.
view moreCredit: Niels H. Andersen, Moesgaard Museum
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 of 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 (see fact box at the bottom of this text).
They also found over 5,000 charred grain kernels of naked barley, emmer wheat, and durum wheat, amongst 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 analysed 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 few phytoliths on the stones, and the starch grains they identified came from wild plants instead of 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.
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 analysed them for phytoliths or starch,” explains Niels H. Andersen.
This is the first time a state-of-the-art combination of phytolith and starch analyses has been performed on grinding stones from the first farmers in Northern Europe. The results support a hypothesis that archaeobotanists and archaeologists elsewhere in Northern Europe also have proposed after discovering remains of grains cooked into porridge and gruel: that the first farmers did not live on water and bread but rather on water and gruel, alongside berries, nuts, roots, and meat.
And yes, they likely drank water. According to Niels H. Andersen, no definitive traces of beer brewing have been found in Denmark before the Bronze Age.
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.”
Facts:
- The Funnel Beaker Culture was an early farming culture in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe during the period ca. 4000–2800 BCE, marking the introduction of agriculture and cattle farming to Scandinavia. The name refers to the culture's commonly found clay beakers with funnel-shaped necks.
- The discovery on Southern Funen is the most extensive find of grinding stones and grains from the Funnel Beaker Culture in the entire region it encompassed.
- The study was done in collaboration between researchers from Moesgaard Museum and Aarhus University in Denmark, Kiel University in Germany and the Spanish National Research Council (IMF-CSIC) in Barcelona
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. Click to view the image in a larger format.
Credit
Cristina N. Patús, HUMANE, Barcelona.
Journal
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Plant use at Funnel Beaker sites: combined macro- and microremains analysis at the Early Neolithic site of Frydenlund, Denmark (ca. 3600 bce)
Article Publication Date
16-Dec-2024
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