Islands without Iron. Strategies for Manufacturing Prehistoric Rotary Querns without Metal Tools in the Canary Islands: Working Hypotheses and Experimentation

Abstract

The introduction of the rotary quern into the Iberian Peninsula during the Iron Age represents a great technological innovation with regard to processing cereals. These mechanisms arrived several centuries later in the Canarian archipelago with the first North African colonists. Contacts with the African continent appear to have either been cut off or minimised a short time later, obliging the colonists to subsist autonomously and adapt to the features of the new territory. Moreover, the archipelago's volcanic character does not offer minerals that could be transformed into metals obliging the new populations to resort to stone tools, an adaptation evidenced by the manufacture of rotary querns. Currently few technological studies of these querns have combined experimental work with hypotheses stemming from archaeological evidence. This article presents two experimental programs that have attempted to reconstruct the operational sequence (chaîne opératoire) of the two main types of rocks exploited for querns in the Canary Islands: volcanic tuff and vesicular basalt.