The earliest crops that were grown include types of wheat known as emmer and einkorn, different varieties of barley, and possibly rye. For a further two thousand years, Britain’s population carried on their hunting and gathering lifestyle, but around 4000 BC farming was adopted here with plants and animals being brought from mainland Europe by boat. By about 6000 BC agriculture had reached the North European Plain, which is now the area of Germany and Poland.īy that time, sea levels had risen, flooding what had been dry land during the Ice Age and turning Britain into an island. It spread slowly across Europe from the area around Syria and Iraq when, from about 7000 BC, people started moving west and east, taking their crops, animals and ideas with them. – From Note Book of Ordinary Things 7: The Grinding Stones of the Yesteryears by JohnyML at the blog By All Means Necessary.Farming began in the Middle East, China, India and South East Asia about 10,000 years ago. It took another year for them to come back as they know that those stones did not need weekly tending. They took a paltry sum and some snacks and left. These men and women who used to make these stones ‘rough’ did it with such care and love that they made floral patterns on the grinding stones and the stone rolling pin. This maintenance of the grinding stones is done by making pin point incisions on the surface so that the surface of the stone remains a bit rough, making the grinding fast and fine. There used to be people coming from unknown places by cycle calling out ‘Ammi kothaanundo Ammi’ (Anybody wants their grinding stones to be tended?). They have stopped now moving or working in large scale. There used to be stone cutters travelling from one place to another, making grinding stones and selling it in the local market. The granite slab was called Thallakkallu (Mother Stone) and roller was called Pillakkallu (Child Stone). But in the rural parlance it used to have more intimate terms which conjoin both the pieces in a familial relationship. The name Ammikkallu comes from Tamil, where Ammi/Amma means mother and Kallu means stone. Grinding stones are of different types and are still used by the rural people and also the nomadic people who live in temporary shacks in the abandoned plots. There is one cylindrical granite piece which is used as a roller to grind the spices and coconut to make the spicy paste and chutneys… is a very primitive tool that came from the nomadic tribes to the kitchens of the settled family units and it remained as an important kitchen device for many centuries till mixers (called mixies) and grinders replaced them. So let’s stick to Ammikkallu… it is a flat granite block measuring a width of a foot and length of one and half feet. – From the article Short History of Grinding Implements for Domestic Use in Japan by Shigeo Miwa, Atsuko Shimosaka, Jusuke Hidaka, Department of Chemical Engineering, Doshisha University, published in Kona Powder and Particle Journal, 1984. Though in Korea there was some unambiguous proof of the existence of saddle quern, in Japan there is no clear evidence indicating that it was used. A sort of saddle quern “Metate” which consisted of bench- or trough-like bed stone and often made of volcanic rock, was used for grinding maize by the American aborigines. Saddle querns might have been specialized closely related with the processing of wheat and barley, and were discovered in the relics of Neolithic sites in Africa, Western and Northern Asia. Numerous statuettes from Egyptian tombs depict women kneeling at the saddle quern, grinding meal to offer the dead in the after-life. In the course of time, probably thousands of years of use, this primitive implement was gradually developed to a more favoured milling implement – the fully developed saddle quern, consisting of a concave lower stone, on which a smaller stone was rubbed to grind the materiel. Also it held the possibility of making the grinding process continuous. The back-and-forth motion of the grinding slab made a shearing action possible under more precise control than the mortar and pestle did. If the size of the upper stone is restricted by the fact that one must be able to lift it with both hands, one possible way for the enlargement of the rubbing area is the use of a flat dish-shaped understone as a grinding slab. For such use, a larger rubbing area is a basic requirement. …rubbing the inner surface of the mortar with the roundish end of the pestle could be used for grinding to powder.
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