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Abstract
This archaeometric study was focused on 28 grey to dark-grey lava artifacts found in Ustica Island (Southern Tyrrhenian Sea, Italy) and referable to different grinding tools: saddle querns, rotary Morgantina-type millstones, rotary hand-mills and one small mortar. Mineralogy, petrography and bulk rock geochemical analyses emphasized that most of the grinding artifacts belonged to the Na-Alkaline series of Ustica, mainly basalts, hawaiites and mugearites. Nevertheless, some millstone samples did not match major and trace elements of Ustica lavas, in particular, one high-TiO2 Na-Alkaline basalt from Pantelleria Island, some tholeiitic/transitional basalts from the Iblei Mountains and one Calcalkaline basaltic andesite, most likely from the Aeolian Archipelago. The Hellenistic–Roman re-colonisation of Ustica Island, after ca. one millennium of nearly complete abandonment, was testified by the import of the non-local Morgantina-type rotary millstones, very widespread in the Mediterranean area from 4th–3rd century BC. This import of millstones represented, for the Ustica inhabitants, a real breakthrough for developing a local production of grinding artifacts on the basis of the new rotary technique which was much more efficient than that of the archaic saddle querns, largely used in the Middle Bronze Age. The results are also discussed in the framework of the overall volcanic millstone trade in the Mediterranean area and the different milling technology in antiquity.
Highlights
Most of the millstones for grinding cereals in antiquity and discovered throughout the Mediterranean area were made of volcanic rocks, with a widespread trade mostly in the Hellenistic
In the TAS classification diagram, we can observe three groups: 23 samples are within the basalt and trachybasalt fields, 4 samples fall in the basaltic trachyandesite field and only one is a basaltic andesite (Figure 4a)
The investigated saddle querns are only made of Na-Alkaline Ustica lavas and we can infer that during the Middle Bronze Age, the production of the grinding stones was entirely due to the exploitation of local volcanic rocks because of the limited trade
Summary
Most of the millstones for grinding cereals in antiquity and discovered throughout the Mediterranean area were made of volcanic rocks, with a widespread trade mostly in the HellenisticGreek and Roman period [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Most of the millstones for grinding cereals in antiquity and discovered throughout the Mediterranean area were made of volcanic rocks, with a widespread trade mostly in the Hellenistic. Long-distance volcanic millstone trade is testified in the Phoenician–Punic period both in shipwrecked cargoes and terrestrial archaeological sites [11,12]. Lavas are suitable for millstones because of their abrasive property and rough vesicular surface [14,15], providing good grinding capacity [16,17]. As a matter of fact, the wear resistance of lavas made some volcanic lithotypes suitable as flagstones in antiquity [18,19,20]. Among the different milling techniques (Figure 1) the most archaic millstones are represented by both flat and saddle querns [21], with examples in Cyprus and Israel from the Middle–Late Bronze Age and Iron
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