Rotary Querns on the Continent and in the Mediterranean Basin

Abstract

In his two articles on querns (1) Dr Cecil Curwen has given us a really epoch-making contribution to prehistory and history. Not only has he provided the prehistorian with a new instrument for the establishment of chronology, but he has drawn the attention of excavators to a revolutionary but curiously neglected advance in technology. For the rotary mill is the first major application of rotary motion since the invention of the potter's wheel and the lathe in the remote Oriental Copper Age; it led on directly to the invention of geared machinery and the water-wheel and so to the first employment of inanimate motive power apart from the harnessing of the winds to the sail. Though this invention took place in the full light of history, the sole evidence for its origin, apart from a single reference in a writer so late as Pliny (2), is purely archaeological. Unfortunately it is still rather thin; excavators of classical and barbarian sites have generally been too preoccupied with statuary and art-objects on the one hand, with types accepted as chronologically significant on the other, to provide the historian of science with the data he craves. Truhelka for instance, generally so scrupulous in the full publication of all his finds, does not illustrate nor even describe a single quern from Dolja Dolina in Bosnia where he found plenty (3).