Discovering the diet of early Neolithic farmers in Scandinavia

At a Neolithic settlement on the Danish island Funen dating back 5,500 years, archaeologists have discovered both grinding stones and grains from early cereals. However, new research reveals that the inhabitants did not use the stones to grind the cereal grains. Instead of making bread, they likely prepared porridge or gruel from the grains.

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 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.

They also found over 5,000 charred grain kernels of naked barley, emmer wheat, and durum wheat, among 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 analyzed 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 a 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, Ph.D. Welmoed Out from Moesgaard Museum.

She led the study together with senior researcher, Dr. Phil. Niels H. Andersen, also from Moesgaard Museum. The study is published in the 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 analyzed them for phytoliths or starch,” explains 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 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.”

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.