LAUSR

The milling of cereals, other plants and materials is an activity that is essential to the subsistence of human societies. It is a task carried out for the most part by women. Querns are the most representative archaeological artefacts of this activity. However, querns are only a part of more complex operational sequences that stretch beyond these mechanisms and involve other tools such as mortars and sieves that yield a much broader range of cereal products than those commonly identified. This paper reviews a selection of publications from recent decades address this subject from the point of view of ethnography, ethnoarchaeology and archaeobotany, and takes into account a number of features serving to process the more common types of cereals.