Querns were used to produce the flour required every day and were also suitable for the crushing of other food items such as seeds, nuts and legumes. They were manufactured from a range of stone types and the distance over which they were transported depended on a range of factors, not least of which was the availability of locally suitable stone. The saddle quern, used in a back-and-forth motion, was introduced to Britain during the Neolithic period and continued in use through the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age when the rotary quern with its rotational or oscillatory motion was introduced. The rotary quern remained an integral piece of household equipment throughout the Roman period and beyond. Some of the most important British quern quarries during the Iron Age and Roman periods produced querns that were transported many tens and sometimes hundreds of miles. Research in central and southern Oxfordshire over the last thirty years has demonstrated that, even though exposures were limited, local rocks were exploited to make querns. This paper describes the stone types that were used, the chronology of this local quern manufacture, what form the querns took, and how far they were distributed during different periods of our past.

PATTERNS OF QUERN USE

In order to understand local quern production, it is important to appreciate the context of resource procurement in which it sat. The earliest querns in the region date to the Neolithic and Bronze Age, but few querns have been recovered from features of these dates in central and southern Oxfordshire. Saddle querns were the only type of quern in use at this time.