My favourite saddle quern: Long, slim, beautifully curved, well-used: A true masterpiece. But it may have taken thousands of hours of hard grain-grinding work to get to this form. Who did it: A woman, of course! When: Sometime way back when, in the Neolithic, perhaps in the Bronze Age. On display at Archaeological Museum, University of Stavanger, item no. S11891. Photo by Per Storemyr
The basement of the Archaeological Museum at Stavanger University holds the largest collection of grinding stones and querns found at archaeological excavations in Norway. Dating from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages, they show the development from saddle querns to standardised rotary hand querns. The finest querns are on display in the museum, and together with the magazine objects they particularly show the early development of the rotary hand quern in Norway: From 1800 year-old, very diverse specimens to the standardised, transportable rotary quern that we know so well from the Viking Age and later, and which became an important commercial trade good. Continue reading
