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Querns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

E. Cecil Curwen
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Extract

When excavating in the hill-fort of Cissbury a few years ago the writer found nothing by which to date a certain group of pits except a piece of a revolving handmill (FIG. 23). Even this could not supply the necessary chronological evidence, because the developmental history of the quern or hand-mill had not yet been worked out in sufficient detail to enable one to say that a certain form is characteristic of a certain period. Being thus impressed with the need for such a study the writer endeavoured to collect data, but was met at the outset with the difticulty that of all the hand-mills preserved in our Museums extremely few have been dated at all closely by associated finds of pottery—at least so far as records go—while it seems to be exceptional even for modern excavators to note such associations when querns are found. After all, it is, as Pitt Rivers said, the common objects that are often more important than the rare ones, just because they are common, and it is surely one of the prime objects of excavation to obtain data for the study of the evolution, not only of pottery, but of all common objects.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 11 , Issue 42 , June 1937 , pp. 133 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1937

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References

1 My attention has been drawn to this point by Professor Gudmund Hatt of Copenhagen.

2 e.g., on the Gold Coast ; see photo in Peoples of All Nations (edited by Hammerton, J.A. Amalgamated Press, Ltd.), p. 596.Google Scholar

3 Sussex Arch. Coll., 1934, 75, 167.Google Scholar

4 Antiq. Journ., 1933, 75, 27, 29.Google Scholar

5 Bennett, and Elton, History of Corn–milling (1898), 1, 38–9.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 79.

7 Ant. Journ., XII, 290.

8 Xenophon, Anabasis 1, 5, 5;Google Scholar Aristotle, Probl. 35, 3;Google Scholar Alexis, Amph, 1, Pyraun, 4.

9 The saddle-quern was, however, the mill of Homer, as has been pointed out.

10 Gellius, Aulus 3, 3.Google Scholar

11 Cato, R.R., x, 4; XI, 4.

12 Virgil, Moretum, 19–30, 39.Google Scholar

13 In attempting to date querns typologically it should be remembered that the life of a single specimen might be 70 or 80 years—at least in Scotland ; Bennett and Elton, op. cit., 159, 170.

14 Mitchell, Arthur The Past in the Present (1880), 35–7.Google Scholar

15 Glastonbury Museum, Q 8 (W. 8).

16 Columella, R.R., XII, 50.

17 Georgics, I, 275.

18 Bennett, and Elton, op. cit., 1, 210–21.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 171.

20 I am indebted to Professor Gordon Childe for this information.

21 For an account of the brochs see ANTIQUITY, 1927, 1, 290–8.Google Scholar

22 Two pieces of Niedermendig lava were found by Mr Alexander Keiller with Neolithic B pottery in the excavations at the Avebury Avenue, Wilts. (ANTIQUITY, 1936, x, 422). Mr Stuart Piggott tells me that one of these has a smoothed face, suggesting that it formed part of a grain-rubber or saddle-quern. Another piece of similar material was found by Mrs Cunnington in an Early Bronze Age context at ‘The Sanctuary’, Overton Hill, Wilts. (Wilts. Arch. Mag., XLV, 322).