Session: #426

Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each

After thousands of years of exclusive use of saddle querns for grinding grain, a series of more sophisticated mills appeared and evolved in the Mediterranean during the first millennium BC. The first consisted of exceptional variations of saddle querns that emerged in the initial centuries of the first millennium BC. Yet the phenomenon of change and innovation developed later toward the middle of the millennium with the introduction of numerous new mill types such as the rotary quern, the Olynthus mill, the Iberian rotary pushing mill, the Morgantina mill, the Pompeian mill, the ring mill or the Delian mill.
The interest of this session is therefore to offer an overview of the latest research of specialists who are currently analysing grinding systems in the Iron Age and the beginnings of Antiquity. Although the historical circumstances in this period differ between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean, it is precisely the second half of the millennium that saw the expansion of the influences from the colonial world and an interaction, or lack of, between the different cultures.
The new more complex grinding mechanisms introduced in the first millennium BC represent a turning point in the history of milling and processing cereals. Yet many issues remain unclear as to the causes of the introduction of these mills and their socioeconomic repercussions, as well as the evolution and expansion of the different mill types, their raw materials and their diffusion.

Querns, Mediterranean, Antiquity, Iron Age

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Sra. Natàlia Alonso (Spain) ¹

Luc Jaccottey (France) ²
Timothy J. Anderson (Spain) ³