Methods

Contributing to the interpretations of past grinding stone use and associated behaviors in ancient northeastern Tigrai was the incorporation of multiple methods. Methodology applied in my research included ethnoarchaeology, experimentation, analysis of use-wear, morphology, and recovery context. Extending the analysis into all these areas allowed for a deeper and fuller understanding of how grinding stones, and other ground stone tools, fit into the foodways and socio- economic lifeways of the people of ancient Tigrai.

This research combined both ethnographic and experimental research, known uses, to serve as models for understanding the function of archaeological grinding stones, unknown uses. Experimentation included both Tigrai expert grinders (Figure 1) and this researcher who is not an expert. The integrated methods used for this research supported interpretations of ancient tool functions to be made cautiously and conservatively applying analogy only when the characteristics of cultural materials support an interpretation.

For the use-wear analysis all contributing factors were considered, including other than “use” causes of wear that may have occurred caused by production, excavation, and lab wear on surfaces. Microscopic images were taken with a portable Dinolite^tm microscope (Figure 2) of ethnographic and experimental grinding stones and artifacts. A focus on understanding the unused stone surface attributes was necessary to differentiate actual use-wear and all forms of use-wear. This research focused on incorporating tribological principles – adhesive, abrasive, fatigue and tribochemical wear. To address the limited use-wear image reference for materials such as quartzite the methods were developed to ensure collection of images for quartzite grinding stone tool use-wear that can contribute to building a reference collection of images for future researchers to access through this website.