Threshing-board
Encyclopedia
A threshing board is an obsolete farm implement used to separate cereals from their straw; that is, to thresh
. It is a thick board, made with a variety of slats, with a shape between rectangular and trapezoidal, with the frontal part somewhat narrower and curved upward (like a sled or sledge
) and whose bottom is covered with lithic flake
s or razor
-like metal blades.
One form, once common in the Mediterranean Sea
area, was "about three to four feet wide and six feet deep (these dimensions often vary, however), consisting of two or three wooden planks assembled to one another, of more than four inches wide, in which several hard and cutting flints crammed into the bottom part pull along over the grains. In the rear part there is a large ring nailed, that is used to tie the rope that pulls it and to which two horses are usually harnessed; and a person, sitting on the threshing board, drives it in circles over the cereal that is spread on the threshing floor. Should the person need more weight, he need only put some big stones over it."
The dimensions of threshing boards varied. In Spain
, they could be up to approximately two metres in length and a metre and a half wide. There were also smaller threshing boards, as little about a metre-and-a-half long and a metre wide. The thickness of the slats of the threshing board is some five or six centimeters. Nonetheless, since threshing boards are nowadays custom made, made to order or made smaller as an adornment or souvenir, they may range from miniatures up to the sizes previously described.
The threshing board has been traditionally pulled by mules or by oxen over the grains spread on the threshing floor
. As it was moved in circles over the harvest that was spread, the stone chips or blades cut the straw
and the ear of wheat
(which remained between the threshing board and the pebbles on the ground), thus separating the seed without damaging it. The threshed grain was then gathered and set to be cleaned by some means of winnowing.
s, which reap, thresh and clean grain in a single process, the traditional methods of threshing cereals and some legumes were those described by Pliny the Elder
in his Natural History, with three variants: "The cereals are threshed in some places with the threshing board on the threshing floor; in others they are trampled by a train of horses, and in others they are beaten with flails".
In this manner, Pliny refers to the three traditional methods of threshing grain:
and ceremonial practice, to commemorate traditional local customs.
For threshing with the threshing board, first one brings the baled stalks to the threshing floor. Some are stacked, waiting their turn, and others are untied and placed in a circle forming a pile of grain that is heated by the sun. Then, the farmers drag the threshing board over the stalks, first going several times around in circles, and then in figure-eights, and stirring the grain with a wooden pitchfork
. Sometimes, this work was done with another kind of threshing implement: a Plostellum punicum (Latin; literally "Punic cart") or threshing cart, fitted with a group of rollers, each with metallic transverse razors. In this first stage, the straw is detached from the ear; much chaff and dirty dust remains, mixed with the edible grain. Every time that the work of dragging the threshing board is repeated, the grain is stirred again, moving more straw to the edge of the threshing floor. If too much grain is spread on the ground, it has to be raked and swept in order to make a round mound and, if possible, to remove as much straw as possible.
After turning the grain and straw upside down and leaving it to dry during a lunch break, the farmers carry out a second round of threshing in order to separate the last of the grain from the straw. Then, they use pitchforks, rakes and brooms to create a mound. A pair of oxen or mules pulls the threshing board by means of a chain or a strap fixed to a hook nailed in the front plank; donkey
s are not used, because unlike mules and oxen they often defecate on the crops. The driver rides on the threshing board, both guiding the draft animals and increasing the weight of the threshing board. If the driver's weight is not enough, large stones are put on the board. In recent times, the animals are sometimes replaced with a tractor
; because the driver no longer sits on the board, the weight of stones becomes more important. Children enjoy riding on the threshing board for fun, and the farmers allow it because their weight is useful, as long as the children are not too boisterous. During this process, if the stalks are excessively squashed, two large metal arcs are affixed to the back of the threshing board; these turn-up and give volume to the straws, behind the threshing.
After threshing is finished, to avoid mixing the dirty remnants with the clean, new stalks, the threshing floor must be cleaned first with a rake to move the heavier material, and then with several brooms (in the narrow sense: they are typically made from "broom shrub
"—Cytisus scoparius
—and are stronger than domestic brooms). Also the straw was accumulated carefully and stored, because it was a good fodder
for livestock
. The entire process of threshing generates a thin dust that soaks in through the respiratory system
and sticks to the throat
.
During the sweeping, the husk
s and the chaff
are separated to one part of the threshing-floor, while the grain, still not entirely clean, was winnowed, either by traditional of winnowing with sieve
s, or by a mechanical winnowing machine.
Traditional threshing implements (including the threshing board) were gradually abandoned and replaced by modern combine harvesters. This change, of course, occurred in some areas before others. For instance, in Spain, it happened in the 1950s and 1960s.
Until that time, threshing boards were made in certain particular towns and villages with specialized craftsmen. Whereas the woodworking involved is simple, even rough, the flintknapping and the inlaying of flakes into the bottom of board need specialized skills that were passed from father to son. The most famous Spanish town for this work was, doubtlessly, Cantalejo
(Segovia
), where the craftsmen who made threshing boards were known as briqueros.
and Balkans
. The artefacts are lithic flake
s and, above all obsidian
or flint
blade
s, recognizable through the type of microscopic wear that it has. Her work was completed by Jacques Chabot (of the Centre interuniversitaire d'études sur les lettres, les arts et les traditions, CELAT), who has studied Mitanni
(northern Mesopotamia
and Armenia
). Both count among their specialties the study of microwear analysis, through which it is possible to take a particular piece of flint or obsidian (to take the most common examples) and determine the tasks for which it was used.
Concretely, the cutting of cereals leaves a very characteristic glossy
pattern of wear, owing to the presence of microscopic mineral particles (phytolith
s) in the stalks of the plants. Therefore, scholars using controlled experimental replication studies and functional analysis with a scanning electron microscope
are able to identify stone artifacts that were used sickle
s or threshing boards. The edge damage on the pieces used in threshing boards is distinct because, besides the glossy abrasion characteristic of cutting cereals, they have micro-scars from chipping, as a result of the blows of the threshing board against the rock surface of the threshing floor.
The most productive archaeological site
is Aratashen
, Armenia: a village occupied between 5000 and 3000 BC (Neolithic
and Copper Age
). The archaeological excavations have provided thousands of pieces from the knapping of obsidian (suggesting that Aratashen was a center of production and trade of artifacts of that highly-regarded stone); the rest of the archaeological record
consists mainly of fragments of common pottery, ground stone
s, and other agricultural tools. Analyzing a sample of 200 lithic flakes and blades, selected from the best-preserved pieces, it is possible to differentiate between those used in sickles and those used in threshing boards. The lithic blades of obsidian were knapped using highly-developed and standardized methods, such as the use of a "pectoral crutch" with a copper point. Beginning at the headwaters of the river Euphrates
, where this site is located, the craftsmen and peddlers sold their wares throughout the Middle East
.
The threshing boards must have been important in the protohistory
of Mesopotamia, since they already appear in the some of the oldest written documents discovered: specifically, several sandstone
tablets from the early town of Kish
(Iraq
), engraved with cuneiform
pictograms, which could be the world's oldest surviving written record, dating to the middle of the 4th millennium BC
(Early Uruk period
). One of these tablets, preserved in the Ashmolean Museum
of Oxford University, appears to have pictures of threshing boards on both faces, next to some numeric symbols and other pictograms. These presumed threshing boards (which might instead be sledges) have a shape similar to threshing carts that were used until recently in parts of the Middle East
where non-industrial agriculture survived. Descriptions also appear in numerous cuneiform clay tablet
s as early as the third millennium BC.
There are another representation, in this case without writing, in central Turkey. It is an impression of a cylinder seal
from the archaeological site of Arslantepe-Malatya
, which appeared near of the named «Temple B». The archaeological layers were dated to 3374 BC using dendrochronology
. The stamp shows a figure seated on a threshing board, with a clear image of the lithic flakes inlaid in the bottom of the board. The main figure is sitting (possibly on a throne
) under a dossal
. In front is a driver or oxherd, and there are peasants with pitchforks nearby. According to M. A. Frangipane, that the seal may illustrate a religious scene:
It closely resembles another scene, painted on the walls of the same site (a ceremonial procession of a person of high rank, painted in an archaic lineal style in the colours red and black), although the current condition of the wall obscures the exact nature of the vehicle in which he is seated, it is indeed possible to see that it is pulled by a pair of oxen. Professor Sherratt interprets both scenes as presenting manifestations of civil or religious power. In that era, the threshing board was a sophisticated and expensive implement, built by specialized artisans, using pieces of flint or obsidian; in the case of Lower Mesopotamia, these were imported from far away: in the alluvial plateau of Sumer, as in all south of Mesopotamia, it was impossible to find stone, not even a pebble.
Furthermore, threshing required a threshing floor composed of natural rock, cobbles or, at least, very hard and compressed ground, located in a sunny place situated in a rise in the ground with a constant dry wind, and with a flat base that would not allow puddles to form when it rained. So, a threshing floor was not available to just anybody. It was expensive, as we can see from the biblical citations in the following section. Also, it required draft animals, expensive and difficult to drive (because this was not a matter of having them walk in a straight line). All this meant that a threshing implement required a large amount of harvested grain to pay off the expenditure. Thus, the rise of the threshing board turns on a distinctive, sophisticated system of powerful elites.
The discovery of a ceremonial sledge (perhaps a threshing board) with gold ornaments in the Tomb of Pu-Abi
, one of the "royal tombs" of Ur
, dated from the 3rd millennium BC
, makes clear the underlying problem of distinguishing in the ancient representations between a true threshing board and a sledge (that is, an unwheeled vehicle for hauling freight). Although we know that the threshing board appears no later than the 4th millennium BC
(as we can see in Atarashen and Arslantepe-Malatya), and we also know that the wheel was invented in Mesopotamia in the middle of that same millennium, still, the utilization and spread of the wheel was not instantaneous. The sledges survived at least until the invention of the articulated axle, nearly 2000 BC. During this time, some vehicles were hybrids: sledges with wheels that could be dismantled to overcome obstacles by carrying it on shoulders or, simply, dragging it. Consequently—except in the case of Arslantepe, where the lithic flakes are clear visible—we cannot determine whether these representations are threshing boards or sledges for freight or for rites.
James Frazer
compiled numerous ceremonies of harvest and thresh, that centered on a Cereal Spirit. From the Ancient Egypt
ian era to pre-industrial period, this spirit seems to have reside d in the first threshed sheaf or, sometimes, in the last one.
In the Bible are found four modes of threshing grain (some of which modes are expounded in ):
All four methods are discussed at length in the Talmud.
Two apparently coincident descriptive narratives are given in and with regard to King David's purchase of the threshing floor on Mount Moriah
(as well as Mount Moriah itself). In it, the Lord's directive to Gad, King David's prophet, was to instruct David to "rear an altar unto the Lord in the threshingfloor of Araunah
the Jebusite
" ( and ) during the end of the three-day plague that was then ensuing upon David's people of Israel. In the 1Chronicles account, the purchase of the entire hilltop of Mount Moriah is the subject, which is why the purchase price (verse 25) is different from the 2 Samuel account.
This selection is highly significant for several reasons:
The selected place, Mount Moriah, was owned by Araunah (or, Ornan) the Jebusite, a rich villager who owned and operated the threshing floor on Mount Moriah. Araunah was awed by the visit of the king and offered his oxen to sacrifice
and the threshing boards and other implements as wood for the sacrifice. Even so, David rejected any gift to come from a pagan and instead affirmed his intent to purchase first the oxen and threshing floor, then, later, the whole of Mount Moriah that contained it. Had David accepted Araunah's offer, it would have been Araunah's sacrifice instead of David's.
The references to the purchase are ostensively contradictory about the purchase price; it is 50 shekel
s of silver
according to , and 600 shekels of gold
according to . However, this contradiction is only on the surface. The 50 shekels was the initial price to purchase the two oxen and the threshing floor, but the later price of 600 shekels was paid to purchase the property of Mount Moriah in addition to the oxen and threshing floor contained within and earlier purchased.
Generally, all threshing floors were located on hilltops, not to associate with the various gods, but to expose them to prevailing winds that assist in the process of winnowing. The wind adds to the typology of the threshing floor, as the wind is a type of the Holy Ghost (see ).
The last biblical mention of threshing floors is in and . The term "floor" is the Greek halon which means threshing floor, and this fits the import of the two verses. The typology of the threshing floor on Mount Moriah, Solomon's Temple, and these two verses are significant.
As for the word "thresh," the last biblical mention is in , again showing the typology of separating the chaff from the wheat.
Carthage
, which colonized the southeastern Iberian Peninsula
in the 3rd century BC, had advanced agricultural technology, greatly superior to the Roman techniques of the time. Their methods astonished travellers such as Agathocles
and Regulus
, and were an inspiration for the writings of Varro
and Pliny. One well-known Carthaginian agronomist, Mago
, wrote a treatise that was translated into Latin by order of the Roman Senate. The ancient Romans describe Tunisia, today mainly desert, as a fertile landscape of olive grove
s and wheat fields
. In Hispania
, the Carthaginians are known to have introduced several new crops (mainly fruit tree
s) and some machines like the threshing board, either the version with stone-chips (tribulum in Latin) or the version with rollers (threshing cart, named in their honour plostellum punicum by the Romans).
In Rome
, the threshing board had only economic significance, without the religious symbolism it took on in ancient Israel. The treatises of agriculture written by Roman experts as Cato, Varro, Columella and Pliny the Elder (quoted above), touch the topic of threshing. In chronological order:
in a broad sense, without entering into great detail and focusing, essentially, on Western Europe
because it is difficult to find any trustworty documents about threshing boards in that era. The barbarian invasions of Europe had detrimental effects upon agriculture as well as upon the general economy, leading to the loss of many of the more advanced techniques, among them the threshing board, which was completely alien to Germanic tradition. The eastern Mediterranean areas, on the other hand, continued the use of the threshing board, passing into the Muslim culture, where it took deep root.
In the Iberian Peninsula, in the Visigothic kingdom and the Christian zone during the Reconquista
, the threshing board was little known (although awareness of it never quite disappeared). The degradation extended not only to the economy, but also to the very sources that we have to study the period: scholars are confronted with a documentary void that is difficult to get around. It is certain that in Islamic Al-Andalus
, the threshing board continued to be very popular, which led to the Christians recuperating the tradition as they advanced in the Reconquista
. This act coincides with a generalized recovery in all of Europe. Economic prosperity began to return at the start of the 11th century; the experts speak of the increased area of tilled lands; the increased use of draft animals (first oxen, thanks to the frontal yoke, and later horses, thanks to harness collar
); of the increase in metal tools and improved metalworking; of the appearance of the moldboard plough, often with wheels; and the increase in watermills. Livestock became a sign of progress: peasants, less dependent and more prosperous, became able to buy draft animals, and even plows. The peasants who had their own plow and one or two draft animals were a small elite, pampered by the feudal lord, who acquired a distinct status,
that of yeoman farmers, quite distinct from farm-hand labourer whose only tool was their own arms. The existence of draft animals does not imply the diffusion of the threshing board in Western Europe, where the flail continued to be the preferred threshing implement. On the other hand, in Spain, the weight of Eastern tradition made the difference: Professor Julio Caro Baroja
admits that in Spain the threshing board appears cited or represented in works of art. Concretely, he mentions some Romanesque reliefs in Beleña (Salamanca) and Campisábalos (Guadalajara), both from the 12th century. One may add a document written in 1265, in which a woman named Doña Mayor (widow of one Don Arnal, an ecclesiastical tax collector, and thus a person of good position), leaves to the diocese
chapter
of Salamanca
her inheritance of Valcuevo, a farm in the municipality of Valverdón
, Salamanca:
These documents, at least testify for the presence of threshing boards, which, undoubtedly was continuous from then until recently in the Mediterranean basin. The rest is mere generalized speculation, given that traditional historiography centers on features more like of Western Europe
. In any case, none of the consulted authors describe the threshing board as playing a relevant part in the progress of medieval agriculture. We must, then, join with the despair of French historian Georges Duby
, in his complaint:
----
Nowadays, numerous elements of traditional agriculture are being lost, and because of this various entities have been working to conserve or recover this cultural capital. Among these is an international interdisciplinary project called E.A.R.T.H., Early Agricultural Remnants and Technical Heritage. Participating countries include Bulgaria
, Canada
, France
, Russia
, Scotland
, Spain
, and the United States
, in alphabetical order. Investigations center on broad archeological, documentary and ethnological aspects, related to diverse elements of traditional agriculture, threshing boards among them, in diverse countries, historical periods and societies.
and the Cega River. Modern Cantalejo arose in the 11th century, although there are architectural remains that are much older, and forms part of Segovia
province in Spain. It was apparently prosperous at the beginning but, lost its liberty in the 17th Century and became a jurisdictional lordship. There is no clear record of when the specialized craft of making threshing boards was introduced into Cantalejo, but all who have written on the topic indicate that it was probably during the 16th or 17th century.
The production of threshing boards appears to coincide with the arrival of foreign artisans, although this is speculation based on the fact that the artisans' form of speech includes aspects of many foreign languages, especially French
. The makers of threshing boards and plows were called «Briqueros», a word of French origin that refers to the making of tinderbox
es and matchlock
s for guns, which in France were called briquets
, literally in archaic French: «Petite pièce d’acier don't on se sert pour tirer du feu d’un caillou.» (today, synonym of briquette
or flammable matter, but also refers to a lighter
) for the early firearms
(Flintlock
s, arquebus
es, musket
s...). It is therefore plausible that foreign gunsmiths introducing firearms in the Iberian Peninsula created an important colony in Cantalejo, although it is difficult to determine their origin
In any case, with time Cantalejo opted for peaceful and productive crafts such as the making of diverse agricultural implements, including threshing boards. By the 1950s, Cantalejo had reached 400 workshops producing more than 30,000 threshing boards each year; this suggests that more than half the population was dedicated to this occupation. The threshing boards were then distributed throughout the entire Meseta Central of Spain.
This article concentrates on threshing boards made only with flint chips, although there were threshing boards made with metal teeth or according to other, less common designs.
, which they cut and carefully smoothed with a device called a tronzador until the trunks were formed into cylinders nearly two meters in length; these log sections were called tozas. They also prepared long, straight planks to serve as transverse headpieces. They carried the log sections to the sawmill, where they cut slats as wide as the log permitted (no less than 20 centimeters), of some five centimeters in thickness and with a curved shape (just like a ski
) on the end that would eventually be in front. The planks were dried in the sun for several months, turned over every so often. The village during this period took on a peculiar appearance, as many buildings had their façades covered with drying planks. Afterwards, these were piled in castillos, crossing some slats with others in order to make the pile more stable.
Once the slat was in the right conditions, the next process was chiseling: using a hammer
and chisel to prepare the slots (ujeros) for the chips of flint (chinas or lithic flakes). The chiseling was done with the slats front-on, guided by pencil-marks so the workman wouldn't err. Before beginning, the workman made sure that the slat had not warped since being cut, as that would make it unusable.
The next pass took place in the mechanical presses; the Spanish language term for these was "cárceles", "jails". The three, four, or five planks had to be perfectly joined: spread with glue and pressed, using small reinforcement jigs, called tasillos (wooden cylinders glued and nailed with a mallet at the edges of a slat), and wedges. When the slats were well-aligned and fixed in place, the cabezales (headers), or crosspieces, were nailed in place with big nails known in Spain as puntas de París (although, at least in the 19th and 20th centuries, they came from Bilbao
).
Once the basic structure of the threshing board is ready, it must be smoothed. This is first done by "working" it with an adze lengthwise, along the grain. Then the final finishing is done with various specialized carpenter's plane
s, on both top and bottom; first going across in a transverse direction, and later lengthwish.
The final phase of the work consisted of covering the junctions of the slats on the top side, which is done with thin strips at the front, tacked on with a board called the "front piece", and on the rest using long thin little boards (tapajuntas or stopgaps). On the front header they attached a strong hook for the barzón, or iron ring with a strap or a long rod for tying on the drafthorses or oxen.
The raw materials preferred by these artisans was a whitish flint imported from the province of Guadalajara
. When they had to repair threshing boards at home, if they did not have any other raw materials, they would use rounded river pebbles, made of homogeneous, high-grade quartzite
, which they selected during their travels. The flint from Guadalajara was extracted from quarries in large blocks, which were split by hand with hammers of various sizes until the stone reached a size small enough to be comfortably held in the hand.
Knapping: Once manageable chunks of flint were obtained, knapping to obtain lithic flakes was performed using a very light hammer (called a pickaxe) with a narrow handle and a pointed head. Knapping was considered "men's work." To work quartzite pebbles, they used a hammer with a head that was rounded and slightly wider. During the process of removing stone flakes, they sometimes resorted to a mormal hammer to crack the stone and achieve perussion plains inaccessible with the pickaxe alone.
The briquero held the stone core
in the left hand, protected with a piece of leather and with the palm upward, and struck rapid blows using a pick held in the right hand. The stone flakes would fall into the palm of the right hand, on top of the leather protector, which allowed the worker to evaluate them during fractions of a second: if they were acceptable, the briquero allowed them to fall into a tin; if not, he threw them into a reject pile. This pile was also where the briquero threw used-up stone cores —that is, stone blocks incapable of producing more chips; pieces of stone broken by accident; cortical
flint flakes, useless fragments, and debris.
The working of pebbles was similar to the working of flint, except that with pebbles only the outside layer was chipped off. Thus, the pebbles were essentially "peeled" and discarded (unlike flint stones, whose interiors were worked until they were used up); using only the cortical flakes.
Covering the board with stone flakes was mainly the work of women called enchifleras. The task is monotonous and repetitive. Up to three thousand lithic flakes may be pounded into a large threshing board. In addition, it is necessary to sort the flakes: small ones in the front, medium-sized in the middle, and the largest on the sides and in the back. It is necessary to pound in each flake without damaging its sharp edge, although it was impossible to avoid leaving at least some small mark (a "spontaneous retouch
" in technical terms). The tool used was a light hammer with a cylindrical head and flat or concave ends. The flakes are inserted into the cracks at their thickest part (technically, the percussion zone, that is, the proximal heel of the flake as it is struck off.)
, Madrid
, Castile-La Mancha
, Aragon
and Valencia. They sometimes also reached Andalusia
y Cantabria
. At first, artesans from Cantalejo travelled with large carts loaded with selected threshing boards, winnowing bellows, grain measures
(of different traditional dry units: celemín is a wooden case with 4,6 L, cuartilla has 14 L, and fanega equivalent to 55.5 L...) and other implements for threshing or winnowing, which they peddled from town to town. They also carried flint chips, and tools and supplies for repairing damaged threshing boards and farming implements. In later times, they traveled by train to pre-arranged stations, and then in small trucks. They typically brought their entire families along; combined with their strange manner of speaking and unusual occupation, this gave the briqueros an air of mystery. They began selling threshing boards as soon as the threshing boards were complete, beginning in April and lasting until August. The briqueros would then return to their home town (the Vilorio) to celebrate the festivals of the Assumption of Mary
(August 15) and Saint Roch
(August 16) with their families.
used by makers and vendors of threshing boards in Cantalejo and some other parts of Spain. It is not a technical vocabulary, but rather a code made up of a small group of words that allows the speakers to communicate freely in the presence of strangers without others understanding the content of the conversation.
Gacería was purely verbal, colloquial, and associated with the selling of threshing boards; as a result, it largely disappeared with the mechanization of agriculture. Nevertheless, a number of studies have attempted to record its varied aspects. There are many doubts regarding the origin of the words that make up the vocabulary of Gacería, including the word Gacería itself, which may derive from the Basque
word gazo, which means "ugly" or "good-for-nothing". The most commonly-accepted opinion is that most of the words derive from French
, with additions from other languages including Latin
, Basque, Arabic, German
, and even Caló
. What is certain is that the makers and vendors of threshing boards took words from any area they visited regularly, creating a linguistic mishmash.
The "threshing sledge" is the most common type. As its name indicates, it is dragged over the ripe grain, and it threshes using cutting pieces made of stone or metal. This is what is referred to in Hebrew as morag (מורג) and in Arabic as mowrej. Strictly speaking, the threshing boards of the Middle East
have characteristics that render them easily distinguishable from those found in Europe. On the Iberian peninsula
, cutting blades found on the bottom part of the threshing board are arranged on end and in rows roughly parallel to the direction of threshing. In contrast, the mogag and mowrej found to the Middle East have circular holes (made with a special short, wide drill
) into which are pressed small round, semicircular stones with sharp ridges. (See a detail photo of a Middle-Eastern threshing board).
As mentioned previously, not all threshing boards are equipped with stones: some have metal knife blades embedded along the full length of the threshing board, and others have smaller blades encrusted here and there. Threshing sledges with metal knives usually have a few small wheels (four to six, depending on the size) with eccentric axes. These wheels protect the blades. They also make the threshing board wobble, causing parts of the board to rise and fall at random in an oscillating motion that improves the effectiveness of the threshing.
Threshing
Threshing is the process of loosening the edible part of cereal grain from the scaly, inedible chaff that surrounds it. It is the step in grain preparation after harvesting and before winnowing, which separates the loosened chaff from the grain...
. It is a thick board, made with a variety of slats, with a shape between rectangular and trapezoidal, with the frontal part somewhat narrower and curved upward (like a sled or sledge
Sled
A sled, sledge, or sleigh is a land vehicle with a smooth underside or possessing a separate body supported by two or more smooth, relatively narrow, longitudinal runners that travels by sliding across a surface. Most sleds are used on surfaces with low friction, such as snow or ice. In some cases,...
) and whose bottom is covered with lithic flake
Lithic flake
In archaeology, a lithic flake is a "portion of rock removed from an objective piece by percussion or pressure," and may also be referred to as a chip or spall, or collectively as debitage. The objective piece, or the rock being reduced by the removal of flakes, is known as a core. Once the proper...
s or razor
Razor
A razor is a bladed tool primarily used in the removal of unwanted body hair through the act of shaving. Kinds of razors include straight razors, disposable razors and electric razors....
-like metal blades.
One form, once common in the Mediterranean Sea
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant...
area, was "about three to four feet wide and six feet deep (these dimensions often vary, however), consisting of two or three wooden planks assembled to one another, of more than four inches wide, in which several hard and cutting flints crammed into the bottom part pull along over the grains. In the rear part there is a large ring nailed, that is used to tie the rope that pulls it and to which two horses are usually harnessed; and a person, sitting on the threshing board, drives it in circles over the cereal that is spread on the threshing floor. Should the person need more weight, he need only put some big stones over it."
The dimensions of threshing boards varied. In Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
, they could be up to approximately two metres in length and a metre and a half wide. There were also smaller threshing boards, as little about a metre-and-a-half long and a metre wide. The thickness of the slats of the threshing board is some five or six centimeters. Nonetheless, since threshing boards are nowadays custom made, made to order or made smaller as an adornment or souvenir, they may range from miniatures up to the sizes previously described.
The threshing board has been traditionally pulled by mules or by oxen over the grains spread on the threshing floor
Threshing floor
A threshing floor is a specially flattened surface, usually circular and paved, where a farmer would thresh the grain harvest and then winnow it, before the advent of threshing machines from the nineteenth century onwards. The threshing floor was either owned by the entire village or by a single...
. As it was moved in circles over the harvest that was spread, the stone chips or blades cut the straw
Straw
Straw is an agricultural by-product, the dry stalks of cereal plants, after the grain and chaff have been removed. Straw makes up about half of the yield of cereal crops such as barley, oats, rice, rye and wheat. It has many uses, including fuel, livestock bedding and fodder, thatching and...
and the ear of wheat
Wheat
Wheat is a cereal grain, originally from the Levant region of the Near East, but now cultivated worldwide. In 2007 world production of wheat was 607 million tons, making it the third most-produced cereal after maize and rice...
(which remained between the threshing board and the pebbles on the ground), thus separating the seed without damaging it. The threshed grain was then gathered and set to be cleaned by some means of winnowing.
Traditional threshing systems
Until the arrival of combine harvesterCombine harvester
The combine harvester, or simply combine, is a machine that harvests grain crops. The name derives from the fact that it combines three separate operations, reaping, threshing, and winnowing, into a single process. Among the crops harvested with a combine are wheat, oats, rye, barley, corn ,...
s, which reap, thresh and clean grain in a single process, the traditional methods of threshing cereals and some legumes were those described by Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder
Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...
in his Natural History, with three variants: "The cereals are threshed in some places with the threshing board on the threshing floor; in others they are trampled by a train of horses, and in others they are beaten with flails".
In this manner, Pliny refers to the three traditional methods of threshing grain:
- Beating sheafs of grain against a crushing stone or a crushing lump of wood.
- Trampling grain spread on the threshing floor; the trampling would be done by a train of mules or oxen
- Threshing with flailFlail (agriculture)A flail is an agricultural tool used for threshing to separate grains from their husks.It is usually made from two or more large sticks attached by a short chain; one stick is held and swung, causing the other to strike a pile of grain, loosening the husks...
s, a type of traditional wooden tool with which one strikes the pile of grain until the seed is separated from the chaffChaffChaff is the dry, scaly protective casings of the seeds of cereal grain, or similar fine, dry, scaly plant material such as scaly parts of flowers, or finely chopped straw...
.
Threshing with the threshing board
The threshing board is a historical form of threshing that can still be seen in some regions that practise a marginal agriculture. It is also somewhat preserved as an occasional folkloricFolklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...
and ceremonial practice, to commemorate traditional local customs.
For threshing with the threshing board, first one brings the baled stalks to the threshing floor. Some are stacked, waiting their turn, and others are untied and placed in a circle forming a pile of grain that is heated by the sun. Then, the farmers drag the threshing board over the stalks, first going several times around in circles, and then in figure-eights, and stirring the grain with a wooden pitchfork
Pitchfork
A pitchfork is an agricultural tool with a long handle and long, thin, widely separated pointed tines used to lift and pitch loose material, such as hay, leaves, grapes, dung or other agricultural materials. Pitchforks typically have two or three tines...
. Sometimes, this work was done with another kind of threshing implement: a Plostellum punicum (Latin; literally "Punic cart") or threshing cart, fitted with a group of rollers, each with metallic transverse razors. In this first stage, the straw is detached from the ear; much chaff and dirty dust remains, mixed with the edible grain. Every time that the work of dragging the threshing board is repeated, the grain is stirred again, moving more straw to the edge of the threshing floor. If too much grain is spread on the ground, it has to be raked and swept in order to make a round mound and, if possible, to remove as much straw as possible.
After turning the grain and straw upside down and leaving it to dry during a lunch break, the farmers carry out a second round of threshing in order to separate the last of the grain from the straw. Then, they use pitchforks, rakes and brooms to create a mound. A pair of oxen or mules pulls the threshing board by means of a chain or a strap fixed to a hook nailed in the front plank; donkey
Donkey
The donkey or ass, Equus africanus asinus, is a domesticated member of the Equidae or horse family. The wild ancestor of the donkey is the African Wild Ass, E...
s are not used, because unlike mules and oxen they often defecate on the crops. The driver rides on the threshing board, both guiding the draft animals and increasing the weight of the threshing board. If the driver's weight is not enough, large stones are put on the board. In recent times, the animals are sometimes replaced with a tractor
Tractor
A tractor is a vehicle specifically designed to deliver a high tractive effort at slow speeds, for the purposes of hauling a trailer or machinery used in agriculture or construction...
; because the driver no longer sits on the board, the weight of stones becomes more important. Children enjoy riding on the threshing board for fun, and the farmers allow it because their weight is useful, as long as the children are not too boisterous. During this process, if the stalks are excessively squashed, two large metal arcs are affixed to the back of the threshing board; these turn-up and give volume to the straws, behind the threshing.
After threshing is finished, to avoid mixing the dirty remnants with the clean, new stalks, the threshing floor must be cleaned first with a rake to move the heavier material, and then with several brooms (in the narrow sense: they are typically made from "broom shrub
Broom (shrub)
Brooms are a group of evergreen, semi-evergreen, and deciduous shrubs in the subfamily Faboideae of the legume family Fabaceae, mainly in the three genera Chamaecytisus, Cytisus and Genista, but also in many other small genera . All genera in this group are from the tribe Genisteae...
"—Cytisus scoparius
Cytisus scoparius
Cytisus scoparius, the Common Broom and Scotch Broom, syn. Sarothamnus scoparius, is a perennial leguminous shrub native to western and central Europe,....
—and are stronger than domestic brooms). Also the straw was accumulated carefully and stored, because it was a good fodder
Fodder
Fodder or animal feed is any agricultural foodstuff used specifically to feed domesticated livestock such as cattle, goats, sheep, horses, chickens and pigs. Most animal feed is from plants but some is of animal origin...
for livestock
Livestock
Livestock refers to one or more domesticated animals raised in an agricultural setting to produce commodities such as food, fiber and labor. The term "livestock" as used in this article does not include poultry or farmed fish; however the inclusion of these, especially poultry, within the meaning...
. The entire process of threshing generates a thin dust that soaks in through the respiratory system
Respiratory system
The respiratory system is the anatomical system of an organism that introduces respiratory gases to the interior and performs gas exchange. In humans and other mammals, the anatomical features of the respiratory system include airways, lungs, and the respiratory muscles...
and sticks to the throat
Throat
In vertebrate anatomy, the throat is the anterior part of the neck, in front of the vertebral column. It consists of the pharynx and larynx...
.
During the sweeping, the husk
Husk
Husk in botany is the outer shell or coating of a seed. It often refers to the leafy outer covering of an ear of maize as it grows on the plant. Literally, a husk or hull includes the protective outer covering of a seed, fruit or vegetable...
s and the chaff
Chaff
Chaff is the dry, scaly protective casings of the seeds of cereal grain, or similar fine, dry, scaly plant material such as scaly parts of flowers, or finely chopped straw...
are separated to one part of the threshing-floor, while the grain, still not entirely clean, was winnowed, either by traditional of winnowing with sieve
Sieve
A sieve, or sifter, separates wanted elements from unwanted material using a woven screen such as a mesh or net. However, in cooking, especially with flour, a sifter is used to aerate the substance, among other things. A strainer is a type of sieve typically used to separate a solid from a liquid...
s, or by a mechanical winnowing machine.
Traditional threshing implements (including the threshing board) were gradually abandoned and replaced by modern combine harvesters. This change, of course, occurred in some areas before others. For instance, in Spain, it happened in the 1950s and 1960s.
Until that time, threshing boards were made in certain particular towns and villages with specialized craftsmen. Whereas the woodworking involved is simple, even rough, the flintknapping and the inlaying of flakes into the bottom of board need specialized skills that were passed from father to son. The most famous Spanish town for this work was, doubtlessly, Cantalejo
Cantalejo
Cantalejo is a municipality located in the province of Segovia, Castile and León, Spain. According to the 2004 census , the municipality has a population of 3,622 inhabitants. The dialect known as Gacería was spoken here....
(Segovia
Segovia (province)
Segovia is a province of central/northern Spain, in the southern part of the autonomous community of Castile and León. It is bordered by the provinces of Burgos, Soria, Guadalajara, Madrid, Ávila, and Valladolid....
), where the craftsmen who made threshing boards were known as briqueros.
Origins in the Neolithic and Copper Age
Patricia C. Anderson (of Centre d’Etudes Préhistoire, Antiquité et Moyen Age del CNRS), discovered archaeological remains that demonstrate the existence of threshing boards at least 8,000 years old in the Near EastNear East
The Near East is a geographical term that covers different countries for geographers, archeologists, and historians, on the one hand, and for political scientists, economists, and journalists, on the other...
and Balkans
Balkans
The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
. The artefacts are lithic flake
Lithic flake
In archaeology, a lithic flake is a "portion of rock removed from an objective piece by percussion or pressure," and may also be referred to as a chip or spall, or collectively as debitage. The objective piece, or the rock being reduced by the removal of flakes, is known as a core. Once the proper...
s and, above all obsidian
Obsidian
Obsidian is a naturally occurring volcanic glass formed as an extrusive igneous rock.It is produced when felsic lava extruded from a volcano cools rapidly with minimum crystal growth...
or flint
Flint
Flint is a hard, sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as a variety of chert. It occurs chiefly as nodules and masses in sedimentary rocks, such as chalks and limestones. Inside the nodule, flint is usually dark grey, black, green, white, or brown in colour, and...
blade
Blade
A blade is that portion of a tool, weapon, or machine with a cutting edge and/or a pointed tip that is designed to cut and/or puncture, stab, slash, chop, slice, thrust, or scrape animate or inanimate surfaces or materials...
s, recognizable through the type of microscopic wear that it has. Her work was completed by Jacques Chabot (of the Centre interuniversitaire d'études sur les lettres, les arts et les traditions, CELAT), who has studied Mitanni
Mitanni
Mitanni or Hanigalbat was a loosely organized Hurrian-speaking state in northern Syria and south-east Anatolia from ca. 1500 BC–1300 BC...
(northern Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...
and Armenia
Armenia
Armenia , officially the Republic of Armenia , is a landlocked mountainous country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia...
). Both count among their specialties the study of microwear analysis, through which it is possible to take a particular piece of flint or obsidian (to take the most common examples) and determine the tasks for which it was used.
Concretely, the cutting of cereals leaves a very characteristic glossy
Gloss (material appearance)
Gloss is an optical property, which is based on the interaction of light with physical characteristics of a surface. It is actually the ability of a surface to reflect light into the specular direction. The factors that affect gloss are the refractive index of the material, the angle of incident...
pattern of wear, owing to the presence of microscopic mineral particles (phytolith
Phytolith
Some plants can take up silica in the soil, whereupon it is deposited within different intracellular and extracellular structures of the plant. After these plants decay, silica is redeposited in the soil in the form of phytoliths , which are rigid, microscopic structures of varying sizes and shapes...
s) in the stalks of the plants. Therefore, scholars using controlled experimental replication studies and functional analysis with a scanning electron microscope
Scanning electron microscope
A scanning electron microscope is a type of electron microscope that images a sample by scanning it with a high-energy beam of electrons in a raster scan pattern...
are able to identify stone artifacts that were used sickle
Sickle
A sickle is a hand-held agricultural tool with a variously curved blade typically used for harvesting grain crops or cutting succulent forage chiefly for feeding livestock . Sickles have also been used as weapons, either in their original form or in various derivations.The diversity of sickles that...
s or threshing boards. The edge damage on the pieces used in threshing boards is distinct because, besides the glossy abrasion characteristic of cutting cereals, they have micro-scars from chipping, as a result of the blows of the threshing board against the rock surface of the threshing floor.
The most productive archaeological site
Archaeological site
An archaeological site is a place in which evidence of past activity is preserved , and which has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology and represents a part of the archaeological record.Beyond this, the definition and geographical extent of a 'site' can vary widely,...
is Aratashen
Aratashen
Aratashen is a town in the Armavir Province of Armenia. A neolithic-chalcolithic tell is located south of the town.- References :* – World-Gazetteer.com...
, Armenia: a village occupied between 5000 and 3000 BC (Neolithic
Neolithic
The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...
and Copper Age
Copper Age
The Chalcolithic |stone]]") period or Copper Age, also known as the Eneolithic/Æneolithic , is a phase of the Bronze Age in which the addition of tin to copper to form bronze during smelting remained yet unknown by the metallurgists of the times...
). The archaeological excavations have provided thousands of pieces from the knapping of obsidian (suggesting that Aratashen was a center of production and trade of artifacts of that highly-regarded stone); the rest of the archaeological record
Archaeological record
The archaeological record is the body of physical evidence about the past. It is one of the most basic concepts in archaeology, the academic discipline concerned with documenting and interpreting the archaeological record....
consists mainly of fragments of common pottery, ground stone
Ground stone
In archaeology, ground stone is a category of stone tool formed by the grinding of a coarse-grained tool stone, either purposely or incidentally. Ground stone tools are usually made of basalt, rhyolite, granite, or other macrocrystalline igneous stones whose coarse structure makes them ideal for...
s, and other agricultural tools. Analyzing a sample of 200 lithic flakes and blades, selected from the best-preserved pieces, it is possible to differentiate between those used in sickles and those used in threshing boards. The lithic blades of obsidian were knapped using highly-developed and standardized methods, such as the use of a "pectoral crutch" with a copper point. Beginning at the headwaters of the river Euphrates
Euphrates
The Euphrates is the longest and one of the most historically important rivers of Western Asia. Together with the Tigris, it is one of the two defining rivers of Mesopotamia...
, where this site is located, the craftsmen and peddlers sold their wares throughout the Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
.
The threshing boards must have been important in the protohistory
Protohistory
Protohistory refers to a period between prehistory and history, during which a culture or civilization has not yet developed writing, but other cultures have already noted its existence in their own writings...
of Mesopotamia, since they already appear in the some of the oldest written documents discovered: specifically, several sandstone
Sandstone
Sandstone is a sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-sized minerals or rock grains.Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the Earth's crust. Like sand, sandstone may be any colour, but the most common colours are tan, brown, yellow,...
tablets from the early town of Kish
Kish (Sumer)
Kish is modern Tell al-Uhaymir , and was an ancient city of Sumer. Kish is located some 12 km east of Babylon, and 80 km south of Baghdad ....
(Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
), engraved with cuneiform
Cuneiform script
Cuneiform script )) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium , cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs...
pictograms, which could be the world's oldest surviving written record, dating to the middle of the 4th millennium BC
4th millennium BC
The 4th millennium BC saw major changes in human culture. It marked the beginning of the Bronze Age and of writing.The city states of Sumer and the kingdom of Egypt were established and grew to prominence. Agriculture spread widely across Eurasia...
(Early Uruk period
Uruk period
The Uruk period existed from the protohistoric Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age period in the history of Mesopotamia, following the Ubaid period and succeeded by the Jemdet Nasr period. Named after the Sumerian city of Uruk, this period saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia. It was...
). One of these tablets, preserved in the Ashmolean Museum
Ashmolean Museum
The Ashmolean Museum on Beaumont Street, Oxford, England, is the world's first university museum...
of Oxford University, appears to have pictures of threshing boards on both faces, next to some numeric symbols and other pictograms. These presumed threshing boards (which might instead be sledges) have a shape similar to threshing carts that were used until recently in parts of the Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
where non-industrial agriculture survived. Descriptions also appear in numerous cuneiform clay tablet
Clay tablet
In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age....
s as early as the third millennium BC.
Cylinder seal
A cylinder seal is a cylinder engraved with a 'picture story', used in ancient times to roll an impression onto a two-dimensional surface, generally wet clay. Cylinder seals were invented around 3500 BC in the Near East, at the contemporary site of Susa in south-western Iran and at the early site...
from the archaeological site of Arslantepe-Malatya
Malatya
Malatya ) is a city in southeastern Turkey and the capital of its eponymous province.-Overview:The city site has been occupied for thousands of years. The Assyrians called the city Meliddu. Following Roman expansion into the east, the city was renamed in Latin as Melitene...
, which appeared near of the named «Temple B». The archaeological layers were dated to 3374 BC using dendrochronology
Dendrochronology
Dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is the scientific method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree-rings. Dendrochronology can date the time at which tree rings were formed, in many types of wood, to the exact calendar year...
. The stamp shows a figure seated on a threshing board, with a clear image of the lithic flakes inlaid in the bottom of the board. The main figure is sitting (possibly on a throne
Throne
A throne is the official chair or seat upon which a monarch is seated on state or ceremonial occasions. "Throne" in an abstract sense can also refer to the monarchy or the Crown itself, an instance of metonymy, and is also used in many expressions such as "the power behind the...
) under a dossal
Dossal
A Dossal , from French dos , is an ecclesiastical ornamented cloth suspended behind an altar.Altar screen is sometimes used as a synonym for the Dossal....
. In front is a driver or oxherd, and there are peasants with pitchforks nearby. According to M. A. Frangipane, that the seal may illustrate a religious scene:
It closely resembles another scene, painted on the walls of the same site (a ceremonial procession of a person of high rank, painted in an archaic lineal style in the colours red and black), although the current condition of the wall obscures the exact nature of the vehicle in which he is seated, it is indeed possible to see that it is pulled by a pair of oxen. Professor Sherratt interprets both scenes as presenting manifestations of civil or religious power. In that era, the threshing board was a sophisticated and expensive implement, built by specialized artisans, using pieces of flint or obsidian; in the case of Lower Mesopotamia, these were imported from far away: in the alluvial plateau of Sumer, as in all south of Mesopotamia, it was impossible to find stone, not even a pebble.
Furthermore, threshing required a threshing floor composed of natural rock, cobbles or, at least, very hard and compressed ground, located in a sunny place situated in a rise in the ground with a constant dry wind, and with a flat base that would not allow puddles to form when it rained. So, a threshing floor was not available to just anybody. It was expensive, as we can see from the biblical citations in the following section. Also, it required draft animals, expensive and difficult to drive (because this was not a matter of having them walk in a straight line). All this meant that a threshing implement required a large amount of harvested grain to pay off the expenditure. Thus, the rise of the threshing board turns on a distinctive, sophisticated system of powerful elites.
The discovery of a ceremonial sledge (perhaps a threshing board) with gold ornaments in the Tomb of Pu-Abi
Puabi
Puabi , also called Shubad in Sumerian, was an important person in the Sumerian city of Ur, during the First Dynasty of Ur . Commonly labeled as a "queen", her status is somewhat in dispute. Several cylinder seals in her tomb identify her by the title "nin" or "eresh", a Sumerian word which can...
, one of the "royal tombs" of Ur
Ur
Ur was an important city-state in ancient Sumer located at the site of modern Tell el-Muqayyar in Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate...
, dated from the 3rd millennium BC
3rd millennium BC
The 3rd millennium BC spans the Early to Middle Bronze Age.It represents a period of time in which imperialism, or the desire to conquer, grew to prominence, in the city states of the Middle East, but also throughout Eurasia, with Indo-European expansion to Anatolia, Europe and Central Asia. The...
, makes clear the underlying problem of distinguishing in the ancient representations between a true threshing board and a sledge (that is, an unwheeled vehicle for hauling freight). Although we know that the threshing board appears no later than the 4th millennium BC
4th millennium BC
The 4th millennium BC saw major changes in human culture. It marked the beginning of the Bronze Age and of writing.The city states of Sumer and the kingdom of Egypt were established and grew to prominence. Agriculture spread widely across Eurasia...
(as we can see in Atarashen and Arslantepe-Malatya), and we also know that the wheel was invented in Mesopotamia in the middle of that same millennium, still, the utilization and spread of the wheel was not instantaneous. The sledges survived at least until the invention of the articulated axle, nearly 2000 BC. During this time, some vehicles were hybrids: sledges with wheels that could be dismantled to overcome obstacles by carrying it on shoulders or, simply, dragging it. Consequently—except in the case of Arslantepe, where the lithic flakes are clear visible—we cannot determine whether these representations are threshing boards or sledges for freight or for rites.
James Frazer
James Frazer
Sir James George Frazer , was a Scottish social anthropologist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion...
compiled numerous ceremonies of harvest and thresh, that centered on a Cereal Spirit. From the Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
ian era to pre-industrial period, this spirit seems to have reside d in the first threshed sheaf or, sometimes, in the last one.
Biblical references
Any reference to the act of threshing or to the threshing board itself is incomplete without a reference to the threshing floor, because the work of threshing by necessity requires a threshing floor. The first biblical mention of the threshing floor is in . As such, it was not a shed, building, or any place covered with a roof and surrounded by walls, but a circular piece of ground from fifty to a hundred feet in diameter, in the open air, on elevated ground, and made smooth, hardy, and clean. Here the grain was threshed and winnowed.In the Bible are found four modes of threshing grain (some of which modes are expounded in ):
- With a rod or flail. This was for small, delicate seeds such as flitches and cummin. It was also used when only small quantities of grain was to be threshed, or when it was necessary to conceal the operation from an enemy. Examples are found in , when Ruth "beat out" what she had gleaned during the day, and , when Gideon "threshed (Hebrew, chabat, "beat out") wheat by the winepress to hide it from the Midianites."
- With the charuts, Hebrew for "threshing instrument." This is the threshing board or sledge under discussion in this article.
- With the agalah, Hebrew for "cart-wheel." This type of threshing instrument is probably referred to in . The term agalah is supposed to have been the same as the morag, "threshing instrument," mentioned in , , and , though some make the morag and the charuts the same. This instrument is still known in Egypt by the name of mowrej. It consists of three or four heavy rollers of wood, iron, or stone, roughly made and joined together in a square frame, which is in the form of a sledge or drag. Rollers are said to be like barrels of an organ with their projections. Cylinders are parallel with each other and are stuck full of spikes having sharp square points. It is used the same way as the charuts. The driver sits on the machine, and with his weight helps to keep it down. (Authorities are not agreed as to the differences between the charuts, the morag, and the agalah.)
- By treading. The last mode is that of simply treading out the grain with a horse or an ox. is an example of this. The Egyptians used this rather inefficient mode of threshing with multiple oxen, and this mode is still in use in the East.
All four methods are discussed at length in the Talmud.
Moriah
Moriah is the name given to a mountain range by the Book of Genesis, in which context it is giv. the location of the sacrifice of Isaac. Traditionally Moriah has been interpreted as the name of the specific mountain at which this occurred, rather than just the name of the range...
(as well as Mount Moriah itself). In it, the Lord's directive to Gad, King David's prophet, was to instruct David to "rear an altar unto the Lord in the threshingfloor of Araunah
Araunah
Araunah was a Jebusite who was mentioned in the Books of Samuel who owned the threshing floor on the summit of Mount Moriah that David purchased and used as the site for assembling an altar to God. The Scholar renders his name as Arunah....
the Jebusite
Jebusite
According to the Hebrew Bible, the Jebusites were a Canaanite tribe who inhabited and built Jerusalem prior to its conquest by King David; the Books of Kings state that Jerusalem was known as Jebus prior to this event...
" ( and ) during the end of the three-day plague that was then ensuing upon David's people of Israel. In the 1Chronicles account, the purchase of the entire hilltop of Mount Moriah is the subject, which is why the purchase price (verse 25) is different from the 2 Samuel account.
This selection is highly significant for several reasons:
- It was selected by the Lord (not David) .
- Araunah's threshing floor was located on a hilltop called Mount Moriah. It is the same location of Abraham's attempted sacrifice of his son, Isaac .
- The typology of the threshing floor is signified by and . It means that only the grain is gathered and admitted into the kingdom of God, while the chaff is cast into the unquenchable fire.
- On this hilltop was later built Solomon's Temple , whose own typology heightens the significance of the threshing floor typology.
Sacrifice
Sacrifice is the offering of food, objects or the lives of animals or people to God or the gods as an act of propitiation or worship.While sacrifice often implies ritual killing, the term offering can be used for bloodless sacrifices of cereal food or artifacts...
and the threshing boards and other implements as wood for the sacrifice. Even so, David rejected any gift to come from a pagan and instead affirmed his intent to purchase first the oxen and threshing floor, then, later, the whole of Mount Moriah that contained it. Had David accepted Araunah's offer, it would have been Araunah's sacrifice instead of David's.
The references to the purchase are ostensively contradictory about the purchase price; it is 50 shekel
Shekel
Shekel , is any of several ancient units of weight or of currency. The first usage is from Mesopotamia around 3000 BC. Initially, it may have referred to a weight of barley...
s of silver
Silver
Silver is a metallic chemical element with the chemical symbol Ag and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it has the highest electrical conductivity of any element and the highest thermal conductivity of any metal...
according to , and 600 shekels of gold
Gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and an atomic number of 79. Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, malleable and ductile metal. Pure gold has a bright yellow color and luster traditionally considered attractive, which it maintains without oxidizing in air or water. Chemically, gold is a...
according to . However, this contradiction is only on the surface. The 50 shekels was the initial price to purchase the two oxen and the threshing floor, but the later price of 600 shekels was paid to purchase the property of Mount Moriah in addition to the oxen and threshing floor contained within and earlier purchased.
Generally, all threshing floors were located on hilltops, not to associate with the various gods, but to expose them to prevailing winds that assist in the process of winnowing. The wind adds to the typology of the threshing floor, as the wind is a type of the Holy Ghost (see ).
The last biblical mention of threshing floors is in and . The term "floor" is the Greek halon which means threshing floor, and this fits the import of the two verses. The typology of the threshing floor on Mount Moriah, Solomon's Temple, and these two verses are significant.
As for the word "thresh," the last biblical mention is in , again showing the typology of separating the chaff from the wheat.
Classical Greece and Rome
During the early history of Greece and Rome the threshing board was not used. Only after the development of commerce (with occurred in the 5th and 4th centuries in Greece and 2nd and 1st centuries in Rome) and the subsequent transmission of information from the near east that it became widely used. According to V.V. Struve, who cites, in part, verses of The Iliad, the Greeks of the 8th century BC threshed cereals by trampling them with oxen:Carthage
Carthage
Carthage , implying it was a 'new Tyre') is a major urban centre that has existed for nearly 3,000 years on the Gulf of Tunis, developing from a Phoenician colony of the 1st millennium BC...
, which colonized the southeastern Iberian Peninsula
Iberian Peninsula
The Iberian Peninsula , sometimes called Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe and includes the modern-day sovereign states of Spain, Portugal and Andorra, as well as the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar...
in the 3rd century BC, had advanced agricultural technology, greatly superior to the Roman techniques of the time. Their methods astonished travellers such as Agathocles
Agathocles
Agathocles , , was tyrant of Syracuse and king of Sicily .-Biography:...
and Regulus
Marcus Atilius Regulus
Marcus Atilius Regulus , a general and consul in the ninth year of the First Punic War...
, and were an inspiration for the writings of Varro
Marcus Terentius Varro
Marcus Terentius Varro was an ancient Roman scholar and writer. He is sometimes called Varro Reatinus to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus.-Biography:...
and Pliny. One well-known Carthaginian agronomist, Mago
Mago (agricultural writer)
Mago was a Carthaginian writer, author of an agricultural manual in Punic which was a record of the farming knowledge of Carthage. The Punic text has been lost, but some fragments of Greek and Latin translations survive....
, wrote a treatise that was translated into Latin by order of the Roman Senate. The ancient Romans describe Tunisia, today mainly desert, as a fertile landscape of olive grove
Olive Grove
Olive Grove was Sheffield Wednesday F.C.'s first permanent football ground, home to the club for just over a decade at the end of the 19th century...
s and wheat fields
Wheat
Wheat is a cereal grain, originally from the Levant region of the Near East, but now cultivated worldwide. In 2007 world production of wheat was 607 million tons, making it the third most-produced cereal after maize and rice...
. In Hispania
Hispania
Another theory holds that the name derives from Ezpanna, the Basque word for "border" or "edge", thus meaning the farthest area or place. Isidore of Sevilla considered Hispania derived from Hispalis....
, the Carthaginians are known to have introduced several new crops (mainly fruit tree
Fruit tree
A fruit tree is a tree which bears fruit that is consumed or used by people — all trees that are flowering plants produce fruit, which are the ripened ovaries of flowers containing one or more seeds. In horticultural usage, the term 'fruit tree' is limited to those that provide fruit for...
s) and some machines like the threshing board, either the version with stone-chips (tribulum in Latin) or the version with rollers (threshing cart, named in their honour plostellum punicum by the Romans).
In Rome
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
, the threshing board had only economic significance, without the religious symbolism it took on in ancient Israel. The treatises of agriculture written by Roman experts as Cato, Varro, Columella and Pliny the Elder (quoted above), touch the topic of threshing. In chronological order:
- Cato: In the time of Cato the ElderCato the ElderMarcus Porcius Cato was a Roman statesman, commonly referred to as Censorius , Sapiens , Priscus , or Major, Cato the Elder, or Cato the Censor, to distinguish him from his great-grandson, Cato the Younger.He came of an ancient Plebeian family who all were noted for some...
—that is, the 2nd century BC—Rome was intensely connected with the conquered areas of GreeceAncient GreeceAncient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
and CarthageCarthageCarthage , implying it was a 'new Tyre') is a major urban centre that has existed for nearly 3,000 years on the Gulf of Tunis, developing from a Phoenician colony of the 1st millennium BC...
, whose higher degree of agricultural development threatened Roman traditionalism. Cato's book De Agricultura was against exotic innovations such as the threshing board in its different variants, defending instead a traditional agricultural system based on manual labour. To some writers, Cato's ideas drove, indirectly, to the disintegration of republicanRepublicanismRepublicanism is the ideology of governing a nation as a republic, where the head of state is appointed by means other than heredity, often elections. The exact meaning of republicanism varies depending on the cultural and historical context...
society and even the imperial economy. Cato preferred threshing by trampling by mules or oxen. He doesn't expressly mention the threshing board, in spite of the fact it was already spreading through the empire. It is, then, "almost impossible to define, on the basis of Cato's report, when this or that implement or refinement came into use".
- Varro: Unlike Cato, Marcus Terentius VarroMarcus Terentius VarroMarcus Terentius Varro was an ancient Roman scholar and writer. He is sometimes called Varro Reatinus to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus.-Biography:...
was not a man of action but a scholar, a πολιγραφοτάτω, in the 1st century BC. Varro, whose studies were wider than Cato's, tried to combine the cosmopolitan Greek outlook with Rome's provincial traditions. In his book of agricultural advice Rerum Rusticarum de Agri Cultura Varro only twice reflects the reality of his times by mentioning threshing boards. He advises, "None of the implements that can be produced in the plantation (farm) itself should be bought, as with almost all everything which is made from unfinished wood such as hampers, baskets, threshing boards, stakes, rakes…"; the inclination to self-sufficiency that he demonstrates here would later be harmful to Rome. Varro nonetheless shows himself more open to innovation that Cato: "To achieve an abundant and high-quality harvest, the stalks should be taken to the threshing floor without piling them up, so the grain is in the best condition, and the grain (should be) separated from the stalks on the threshing floor, a process which is done, among other ways, with a pair of mules and a threshing board. This is made with a wooden board (with its underside) equipped with stone-chips or saws of iron, which, with a plow in front or a large counterweight, is pulled by a pair of mules yoked together and thus separates the grain from the stalks…". That is, he explains in a very didactic way how the threshing boards works and the advantages of this innovative device. Next, he talks about the variant called plostellum poenicum (=punicum=Punic=Carthaginian), a threshing implement with rollers and metallic saws whose origin is, as we have already seen, Carthaginian, and which was used in Hispania (which had, in the past, been controlled by Carthage): "Another way to make it is by means of a cart with teethed rollers and bearings; this cart is named plostellum punicum, in which one can sit and move the device that is pulled by mules, as it is done in Hispania CiteriorHispania CiteriorDuring the Roman Republic, Hispania Citerior was a region of Hispania roughly occupying the northeastern coast and the Ebro Valley of what is now Spain. Hispania Ulterior was located west of Hispania Citerior—that is, farther away from Rome.-External links:*...
and other places."
- Columella (Lucius Junius ModeratusColumellaLucius Junius Moderatus Columella is the most important writer on agriculture of the Roman empire. Little is known of his life. He was probably born in Gades , possibly of Roman parents. After a career in the army , he took up farming...
, beginning of Common Era0s0s is usually incorrectly considered the first decade of the 1st century and the 1st millennium. However, the number of years in the 0s is not always clearly defined, though the number of years in a decade is always defined as 10. Note that there is no year zero in either the proleptic Gregorian...
- 60s): a native of Hispania BaeticaHispania BaeticaHispania Baetica was one of three Imperial Roman provinces in Hispania, . Hispania Baetica was bordered to the west by Lusitania, and to the northeast by Hispania Tarraconensis. Baetica was part of Al-Andalus under the Moors in the 8th century and approximately corresponds to modern Andalucia...
; after finishing its military career, Columella worked managing large estates. This writer from Hispania brings a new note to this topic, writing, in this case, about threshing floorThreshing floorA threshing floor is a specially flattened surface, usually circular and paved, where a farmer would thresh the grain harvest and then winnow it, before the advent of threshing machines from the nineteenth century onwards. The threshing floor was either owned by the entire village or by a single...
s: "The threshing floor, if it is possible, must be placed in such way that it can be overseen by the master or by the foreman; the best is one that is cobbled, because not only allows that the cereal be quickly threshed, since the ground don't give way to the blows of hoofs and threshing boards, but also, these cereals, before being winnowed, are cleaner and lack the pebbles and little clods that always remaine in a threshing floor of pressed earth."
- Pliny: Pliny the ElderPliny the ElderGaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...
(23 - 79) only compiles what his predecessors had written, which we have already quoted.
Middle Ages
We will speak of the Middle AgesMiddle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
in a broad sense, without entering into great detail and focusing, essentially, on Western Europe
Western Europe
Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
because it is difficult to find any trustworty documents about threshing boards in that era. The barbarian invasions of Europe had detrimental effects upon agriculture as well as upon the general economy, leading to the loss of many of the more advanced techniques, among them the threshing board, which was completely alien to Germanic tradition. The eastern Mediterranean areas, on the other hand, continued the use of the threshing board, passing into the Muslim culture, where it took deep root.
In the Iberian Peninsula, in the Visigothic kingdom and the Christian zone during the Reconquista
Reconquista
The Reconquista was a period of almost 800 years in the Middle Ages during which several Christian kingdoms succeeded in retaking the Muslim-controlled areas of the Iberian Peninsula broadly known as Al-Andalus...
, the threshing board was little known (although awareness of it never quite disappeared). The degradation extended not only to the economy, but also to the very sources that we have to study the period: scholars are confronted with a documentary void that is difficult to get around. It is certain that in Islamic Al-Andalus
Al-Andalus
Al-Andalus was the Arabic name given to a nation and territorial region also commonly referred to as Moorish Iberia. The name describes parts of the Iberian Peninsula and Septimania governed by Muslims , at various times in the period between 711 and 1492, although the territorial boundaries...
, the threshing board continued to be very popular, which led to the Christians recuperating the tradition as they advanced in the Reconquista
Reconquista
The Reconquista was a period of almost 800 years in the Middle Ages during which several Christian kingdoms succeeded in retaking the Muslim-controlled areas of the Iberian Peninsula broadly known as Al-Andalus...
. This act coincides with a generalized recovery in all of Europe. Economic prosperity began to return at the start of the 11th century; the experts speak of the increased area of tilled lands; the increased use of draft animals (first oxen, thanks to the frontal yoke, and later horses, thanks to harness collar
Horse collar
A horse collar is a part of a horse harness device used to distribute load around a horse's neck and shoulders when pulling a wagon or plow. The collar often supports and pads a pair of curved metal or wood pieces, called hames, to which the traces of the harness are attached...
); of the increase in metal tools and improved metalworking; of the appearance of the moldboard plough, often with wheels; and the increase in watermills. Livestock became a sign of progress: peasants, less dependent and more prosperous, became able to buy draft animals, and even plows. The peasants who had their own plow and one or two draft animals were a small elite, pampered by the feudal lord, who acquired a distinct status,
that of yeoman farmers, quite distinct from farm-hand labourer whose only tool was their own arms. The existence of draft animals does not imply the diffusion of the threshing board in Western Europe, where the flail continued to be the preferred threshing implement. On the other hand, in Spain, the weight of Eastern tradition made the difference: Professor Julio Caro Baroja
Julio Caro Baroja
Julio Caro Baroja was a world-renowned Basque Spanish anthropologist, historian, linguist and essayist. He was known for his special interest in Basque culture, history and society. Of Basque ancestry, he was the nephew of the renowned writer Pio Baroja; and his brother, painter, writer and...
admits that in Spain the threshing board appears cited or represented in works of art. Concretely, he mentions some Romanesque reliefs in Beleña (Salamanca) and Campisábalos (Guadalajara), both from the 12th century. One may add a document written in 1265, in which a woman named Doña Mayor (widow of one Don Arnal, an ecclesiastical tax collector, and thus a person of good position), leaves to the diocese
Diocese
A diocese is the district or see under the supervision of a bishop. It is divided into parishes.An archdiocese is more significant than a diocese. An archdiocese is presided over by an archbishop whose see may have or had importance due to size or historical significance...
chapter
Chapter (religion)
Chapter designates certain corporate ecclesiastical bodies in the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Nordic Lutheran churches....
of Salamanca
Salamanca
Salamanca is a city in western Spain, in the community of Castile and León. Because it is known for its beautiful buildings and urban environment, the Old City was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988. It is the most important university city in Spain and is known for its contributions to...
her inheritance of Valcuevo, a farm in the municipality of Valverdón
Valverdón
Valverdón is a municipality located in the province of Salamanca, Castile and León, Spain. According to the 2004 census , the municipality has a population of 291 inhabitants....
, Salamanca:
And I, Doña Mayor, leave on my death these two yokings of country state above referred to the Cathedral Chapter, well preserved with 76 bushelBushelA bushel is an imperial and U.S. customary unit of dry volume, equivalent in each of these systems to 4 pecks or 8 gallons. It is used for volumes of dry commodities , most often in agriculture...
s of wheat, 38 bushels of rye, and 38 bushels of barley to seed each yoking and with ploughshares, and with plows, and with ploughbeams, and with threshing boards and with all the accoutrements that a well-laid-out property should have.
These documents, at least testify for the presence of threshing boards, which, undoubtedly was continuous from then until recently in the Mediterranean basin. The rest is mere generalized speculation, given that traditional historiography centers on features more like of Western Europe
Western Europe
Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
. In any case, none of the consulted authors describe the threshing board as playing a relevant part in the progress of medieval agriculture. We must, then, join with the despair of French historian Georges Duby
Georges Duby
Georges Duby was a French historian specializing in the social and economic history of the Middle Ages...
, in his complaint:
Through all that has been said, we can see how interesting it would be to measure the influence of technical progress on agricultural output. Nevertheless, we must renounce this hope. Before the end of the 12th century, the methods of seignorial administration were all quite primitive; they granted little importance to writing and even less to numbers. The documents are more deceptive than those of the Carolingian eraCharlemagneCharlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...
.
----
Nowadays, numerous elements of traditional agriculture are being lost, and because of this various entities have been working to conserve or recover this cultural capital. Among these is an international interdisciplinary project called E.A.R.T.H., Early Agricultural Remnants and Technical Heritage. Participating countries include Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
, Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
, Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
, and the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, in alphabetical order. Investigations center on broad archeological, documentary and ethnological aspects, related to diverse elements of traditional agriculture, threshing boards among them, in diverse countries, historical periods and societies.
Craftsmen from Cantalejo
Cantalejo is located at the confluence of the Duraton RiverDuratón River
The Duratón River is a river in Spain. It originates in the municipality of Somosierra in the Sierra de Guadarrama....
and the Cega River. Modern Cantalejo arose in the 11th century, although there are architectural remains that are much older, and forms part of Segovia
Segovia (province)
Segovia is a province of central/northern Spain, in the southern part of the autonomous community of Castile and León. It is bordered by the provinces of Burgos, Soria, Guadalajara, Madrid, Ávila, and Valladolid....
province in Spain. It was apparently prosperous at the beginning but, lost its liberty in the 17th Century and became a jurisdictional lordship. There is no clear record of when the specialized craft of making threshing boards was introduced into Cantalejo, but all who have written on the topic indicate that it was probably during the 16th or 17th century.
The production of threshing boards appears to coincide with the arrival of foreign artisans, although this is speculation based on the fact that the artisans' form of speech includes aspects of many foreign languages, especially French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
. The makers of threshing boards and plows were called «Briqueros», a word of French origin that refers to the making of tinderbox
Tinderbox
A tinderbox is a small container containing flint, firesteel, and tinder , used together to help kindle a fire....
es and matchlock
Matchlock
The matchlock was the first mechanism, or "lock" invented to facilitate the firing of a hand-held firearm. This design removed the need to lower by hand a lit match into the weapon's flash pan and made it possible to have both hands free to keep a firm grip on the weapon at the moment of firing,...
s for guns, which in France were called briquets
Briquette
A briquette is a block of flammable matter used as fuel to start and maintain a fire. Common types of briquettes are charcoal briquettes and biomass briquettes.-Constituents of charcoal briquettes:...
, literally in archaic French: «Petite pièce d’acier don't on se sert pour tirer du feu d’un caillou.» (today, synonym of briquette
Briquette
A briquette is a block of flammable matter used as fuel to start and maintain a fire. Common types of briquettes are charcoal briquettes and biomass briquettes.-Constituents of charcoal briquettes:...
or flammable matter, but also refers to a lighter
Lighter
A lighter is a portable device used to generate a flame. It consists of a metal or plastic container filled with a flammable fluid or pressurized liquid gas, a means of ignition, and some provision for extinguishing the flame.- History :...
) for the early firearms
Firearm
A firearm is a weapon that launches one, or many, projectile at high velocity through confined burning of a propellant. This subsonic burning process is technically known as deflagration, as opposed to supersonic combustion known as a detonation. In older firearms, the propellant was typically...
(Flintlock
Flintlock
Flintlock is the general term for any firearm based on the flintlock mechanism. The term may also apply to the mechanism itself. Introduced at the beginning of the 17th century, the flintlock rapidly replaced earlier firearm-ignition technologies, such as the doglock, matchlock and wheellock...
s, arquebus
Arquebus
The arquebus , or "hook tube", is an early muzzle-loaded firearm used in the 15th to 17th centuries. The word was originally modeled on the German hakenbüchse; this produced haquebute...
es, musket
Musket
A musket is a muzzle-loaded, smooth bore long gun, fired from the shoulder. Muskets were designed for use by infantry. A soldier armed with a musket had the designation musketman or musketeer....
s...). It is therefore plausible that foreign gunsmiths introducing firearms in the Iberian Peninsula created an important colony in Cantalejo, although it is difficult to determine their origin
In any case, with time Cantalejo opted for peaceful and productive crafts such as the making of diverse agricultural implements, including threshing boards. By the 1950s, Cantalejo had reached 400 workshops producing more than 30,000 threshing boards each year; this suggests that more than half the population was dedicated to this occupation. The threshing boards were then distributed throughout the entire Meseta Central of Spain.
This article concentrates on threshing boards made only with flint chips, although there were threshing boards made with metal teeth or according to other, less common designs.
Making the wooden frame
At the end of summer, or in the autumn, work began with the selection of black pinesEuropean Black Pine
Pinus nigra, the European Black Pine, is a moderately variable species of pine, occurring across southern Mediterranean Europe from Spain to the Crimea, in Asia Minor and on Cyprus, and in the high mountains of the Maghreb in North Africa....
, which they cut and carefully smoothed with a device called a tronzador until the trunks were formed into cylinders nearly two meters in length; these log sections were called tozas. They also prepared long, straight planks to serve as transverse headpieces. They carried the log sections to the sawmill, where they cut slats as wide as the log permitted (no less than 20 centimeters), of some five centimeters in thickness and with a curved shape (just like a ski
Ski
A ski is a long, flat device worn on the foot, usually attached through a boot, designed to help the wearer slide smoothly over snow. Originally intended as an aid to travel in snowy regions, they are now mainly used for recreational and sporting purposes...
) on the end that would eventually be in front. The planks were dried in the sun for several months, turned over every so often. The village during this period took on a peculiar appearance, as many buildings had their façades covered with drying planks. Afterwards, these were piled in castillos, crossing some slats with others in order to make the pile more stable.
Once the slat was in the right conditions, the next process was chiseling: using a hammer
Hammer
A hammer is a tool meant to deliver an impact to an object. The most common uses are for driving nails, fitting parts, forging metal and breaking up objects. Hammers are often designed for a specific purpose, and vary widely in their shape and structure. The usual features are a handle and a head,...
and chisel to prepare the slots (ujeros) for the chips of flint (chinas or lithic flakes). The chiseling was done with the slats front-on, guided by pencil-marks so the workman wouldn't err. Before beginning, the workman made sure that the slat had not warped since being cut, as that would make it unusable.
The next pass took place in the mechanical presses; the Spanish language term for these was "cárceles", "jails". The three, four, or five planks had to be perfectly joined: spread with glue and pressed, using small reinforcement jigs, called tasillos (wooden cylinders glued and nailed with a mallet at the edges of a slat), and wedges. When the slats were well-aligned and fixed in place, the cabezales (headers), or crosspieces, were nailed in place with big nails known in Spain as puntas de París (although, at least in the 19th and 20th centuries, they came from Bilbao
Bilbao
Bilbao ) is a Spanish municipality, capital of the province of Biscay, in the autonomous community of the Basque Country. With a population of 353,187 , it is the largest city of its autonomous community and the tenth largest in Spain...
).
Once the basic structure of the threshing board is ready, it must be smoothed. This is first done by "working" it with an adze lengthwise, along the grain. Then the final finishing is done with various specialized carpenter's plane
Plane (tool)
A hand plane is a tool for shaping wood. When powered by electricity, the tool may be called a planer. Planes are used to flatten, reduce the thickness of, and impart a smooth surface to a rough piece of lumber or timber. Planing is used to produce horizontal, vertical, or inclined flat surfaces on...
s, on both top and bottom; first going across in a transverse direction, and later lengthwish.
The final phase of the work consisted of covering the junctions of the slats on the top side, which is done with thin strips at the front, tacked on with a board called the "front piece", and on the rest using long thin little boards (tapajuntas or stopgaps). On the front header they attached a strong hook for the barzón, or iron ring with a strap or a long rod for tying on the drafthorses or oxen.
Working the stone flakes
To create the lithic flakes used to cover threshing boards, the briqueros in Cantalejo used a manufacturing technique similar to prehistoric methods of making tools, except that they used metal hammers rather than percussors made of stone, wood, or antler.The raw materials preferred by these artisans was a whitish flint imported from the province of Guadalajara
Guadalajara (province)
Guadalajara is a province of central/north-central Spain, in the northern part of the autonomous community of Castile-La Mancha. It is bordered by the provinces of Cuenca, Madrid, Segovia, Soria, Zaragoza, and Teruel...
. When they had to repair threshing boards at home, if they did not have any other raw materials, they would use rounded river pebbles, made of homogeneous, high-grade quartzite
Quartzite
Quartzite is a hard metamorphic rock which was originally sandstone. Sandstone is converted into quartzite through heating and pressure usually related to tectonic compression within orogenic belts. Pure quartzite is usually white to gray, though quartzites often occur in various shades of pink...
, which they selected during their travels. The flint from Guadalajara was extracted from quarries in large blocks, which were split by hand with hammers of various sizes until the stone reached a size small enough to be comfortably held in the hand.
Knapping: Once manageable chunks of flint were obtained, knapping to obtain lithic flakes was performed using a very light hammer (called a pickaxe) with a narrow handle and a pointed head. Knapping was considered "men's work." To work quartzite pebbles, they used a hammer with a head that was rounded and slightly wider. During the process of removing stone flakes, they sometimes resorted to a mormal hammer to crack the stone and achieve perussion plains inaccessible with the pickaxe alone.
The briquero held the stone core
Lithic core
In archaeology, a lithic core is a distinctive artifact that results from the practice of lithic reduction. In this sense, a core is the scarred nucleus resulting from the detachment of one or more flakes from a lump of source material or tool stone, usually by using a hard hammer percussor such...
in the left hand, protected with a piece of leather and with the palm upward, and struck rapid blows using a pick held in the right hand. The stone flakes would fall into the palm of the right hand, on top of the leather protector, which allowed the worker to evaluate them during fractions of a second: if they were acceptable, the briquero allowed them to fall into a tin; if not, he threw them into a reject pile. This pile was also where the briquero threw used-up stone cores —that is, stone blocks incapable of producing more chips; pieces of stone broken by accident; cortical
Cortex (archaeology)
In lithic analysis in archaeology the cortex is the outer layer of rock formed on the exterior of raw materials by chemical and mechanical weathering processes. It is often recorded on the dorsal surface of flakes using a three class system: primary , secondary , and tertiary...
flint flakes, useless fragments, and debris.
The working of pebbles was similar to the working of flint, except that with pebbles only the outside layer was chipped off. Thus, the pebbles were essentially "peeled" and discarded (unlike flint stones, whose interiors were worked until they were used up); using only the cortical flakes.
Covering the board with stone flakes was mainly the work of women called enchifleras. The task is monotonous and repetitive. Up to three thousand lithic flakes may be pounded into a large threshing board. In addition, it is necessary to sort the flakes: small ones in the front, medium-sized in the middle, and the largest on the sides and in the back. It is necessary to pound in each flake without damaging its sharp edge, although it was impossible to avoid leaving at least some small mark (a "spontaneous retouch
Retouch (lithics)
Retouch - the work done to an edge of a flint implement in order to make it into a functional tool, or to reshape a used tool. In the case of a core-tool, such as a hand-axe, retouch may simply consist of roughly trimming the edge by striking with a hammerstone, but on smaller, finer flake or blade...
" in technical terms). The tool used was a light hammer with a cylindrical head and flat or concave ends. The flakes are inserted into the cracks at their thickest part (technically, the percussion zone, that is, the proximal heel of the flake as it is struck off.)
Distribution
Threshing boards from Cantalejo captured nearly all the sales in Castile and LeónCastile and León
Castile and León is an autonomous community in north-western Spain. It was so constituted in 1983 and it comprises the historical regions of León and Old Castile...
, Madrid
Madrid (autonomous community)
The Community of Madrid is one of the seventeen autonomous communities of Spain. It is located at the center of the country, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Castilian Central Plateau . The community is also conterminous with the province of Madrid and contains the capital of Spain, which is also...
, Castile-La Mancha
Castile-La Mancha
Castile-La Mancha is an autonomous community of Spain. Castile-La Mancha is bordered by Castile and León, Madrid, Aragon, Valencia, Murcia, Andalusia, and Extremadura. It is one of the most sparsely populated of Spain's autonomous communities...
, Aragon
Aragon
Aragon is a modern autonomous community in Spain, coextensive with the medieval Kingdom of Aragon. Located in northeastern Spain, the Aragonese autonomous community comprises three provinces : Huesca, Zaragoza, and Teruel. Its capital is Zaragoza...
and Valencia. They sometimes also reached Andalusia
Andalusia
Andalusia is the most populous and the second largest in area of the autonomous communities of Spain. The Andalusian autonomous community is officially recognised as a nationality of Spain. The territory is divided into eight provinces: Huelva, Seville, Cádiz, Córdoba, Málaga, Jaén, Granada and...
y Cantabria
Cantabria
Cantabria is a Spanish historical region and autonomous community with Santander as its capital city. It is bordered on the east by the Basque Autonomous Community , on the south by Castile and León , on the west by the Principality of Asturias, and on the north by the Cantabrian Sea.Cantabria...
. At first, artesans from Cantalejo travelled with large carts loaded with selected threshing boards, winnowing bellows, grain measures
Dry measure
Dry measures are units of volume used to measure bulk commodities which are not gas or liquid. They are typically used in agriculture, agronomy, and commodity markets to measure grain, dried beans, and dried and fresh fruit ; formerly also salt pork and fish...
(of different traditional dry units: celemín is a wooden case with 4,6 L, cuartilla has 14 L, and fanega equivalent to 55.5 L...) and other implements for threshing or winnowing, which they peddled from town to town. They also carried flint chips, and tools and supplies for repairing damaged threshing boards and farming implements. In later times, they traveled by train to pre-arranged stations, and then in small trucks. They typically brought their entire families along; combined with their strange manner of speaking and unusual occupation, this gave the briqueros an air of mystery. They began selling threshing boards as soon as the threshing boards were complete, beginning in April and lasting until August. The briqueros would then return to their home town (the Vilorio) to celebrate the festivals of the Assumption of Mary
Assumption of Mary
According to the belief of Christians of the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and parts of the Anglican Communion and Continuing Anglicanism, the Assumption of Mary was the bodily taking up of the Virgin Mary into Heaven at the end of her life...
(August 15) and Saint Roch
Roch
Saint Roch or Rocco ; lived c.1348 - 15/16 August 1376/79 was a Christian saint, a confessor whose death is commemorated on 16 August; he is specially invoked against the plague...
(August 16) with their families.
Gacería
Gacería is a slang or argotArgot
An Argot is a secret language used by various groups—including, but not limited to, thieves and other criminals—to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations. The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, hobby, job,...
used by makers and vendors of threshing boards in Cantalejo and some other parts of Spain. It is not a technical vocabulary, but rather a code made up of a small group of words that allows the speakers to communicate freely in the presence of strangers without others understanding the content of the conversation.
Gacería was purely verbal, colloquial, and associated with the selling of threshing boards; as a result, it largely disappeared with the mechanization of agriculture. Nevertheless, a number of studies have attempted to record its varied aspects. There are many doubts regarding the origin of the words that make up the vocabulary of Gacería, including the word Gacería itself, which may derive from the Basque
Basque language
Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
word gazo, which means "ugly" or "good-for-nothing". The most commonly-accepted opinion is that most of the words derive from French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, with additions from other languages including Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, Basque, Arabic, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, and even Caló
Caló (Spanish Romani)
Caló is a language spoken by the Spanish and Portuguese Romani. It is a mixed language based on Romance grammar, with an adstratum of Romani lexical items through language shift by the Romani community. It is often used as an argot, a secret language for discreet communication amongst Iberian...
. What is certain is that the makers and vendors of threshing boards took words from any area they visited regularly, creating a linguistic mishmash.
Related threshing implements
In general, the term "threshing board" is used to refer to all the different variants of this primitive implement. Technically, we should distinguish at least the two main types of threshing boards: the "threshing sledge," which is the subject of this article, and the "threshing cart."The "threshing sledge" is the most common type. As its name indicates, it is dragged over the ripe grain, and it threshes using cutting pieces made of stone or metal. This is what is referred to in Hebrew as morag (מורג) and in Arabic as mowrej. Strictly speaking, the threshing boards of the Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
have characteristics that render them easily distinguishable from those found in Europe. On the Iberian peninsula
Iberian Peninsula
The Iberian Peninsula , sometimes called Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe and includes the modern-day sovereign states of Spain, Portugal and Andorra, as well as the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar...
, cutting blades found on the bottom part of the threshing board are arranged on end and in rows roughly parallel to the direction of threshing. In contrast, the mogag and mowrej found to the Middle East have circular holes (made with a special short, wide drill
Drill
A drill or drill motor is a tool fitted with a cutting tool attachment or driving tool attachment, usually a drill bit or driver bit, used for drilling holes in various materials or fastening various materials together with the use of fasteners. The attachment is gripped by a chuck at one end of...
) into which are pressed small round, semicircular stones with sharp ridges. (See a detail photo of a Middle-Eastern threshing board).
As mentioned previously, not all threshing boards are equipped with stones: some have metal knife blades embedded along the full length of the threshing board, and others have smaller blades encrusted here and there. Threshing sledges with metal knives usually have a few small wheels (four to six, depending on the size) with eccentric axes. These wheels protect the blades. They also make the threshing board wobble, causing parts of the board to rise and fall at random in an oscillating motion that improves the effectiveness of the threshing.
A second model, which the classic sources refer to as plostellum punicum (literally, the "Punic cart"), ought to be called "threshing cart". Although the Carthaginians, heirs of the Phoenicians, brought this model to the Western Mediterranean, this implement was known at least since the second millennium BC, appearing in the Babylonian texts
Akkadian language
Akkadian is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate...
with a name that we can transliterate
Transliteration
Transliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...
as gīš-bad. Both variants continued to be used well into the 20th century in Europe, and continue to be used in the regions where agriculture has not been mechanized and industrialized. Museums and collectors in Spain retain some threshing carts, which were once highly prized in areas such as the province of Zamora
Zamora (province)
Zamora is a Spanish province of western Spain, in the western part of the autonomous community of Castile and León.The present-day province of Zamora province was one of three provinces formed from the former Kingdom of León in 1833, when Spain was re-organised into 49 provinces.It is bordered by...
, where they were used to thresh garbanzos.
External links
- Early Agricultural Remnants and Technical Heritage (EARTH)
- Patricia C. Anderson, Sound and Science: an approach to the ethnoarchaeology of threshing cereals and pulses, on the EARTH site.
- Reconstruction of a Mesopotamian threshing sledge, reprint from EARTH tribulum: reconstitution d'un traineau à dépiquer mésopotamien: "Threshing board: Reconstruction of a Mesopotamian threshing sledge" (drawings), Centre d'études Préhistorique, Antiquité, Moyen Âge (CEPAM), University of Nice
- Threshing sledges from the Bronze Age and today (CEPAM / Centre de Recherches Archéologiques - CNRS) Día del Mundo Rural 2000 (Rural World Day 2000). Pictures from Miranda de Arga (Navarre, Spain). Laureano Molina Gómez, El trillo del abuelo ("Grandfather's Threshing board"), etnografo.com. Amparo Siguera Los trilleros ("The threshers"), Revista de Folklore; includes some illustrations