Summary: Preparation and Cooking Food
Key dates:
Flint scrapers and knives were used in the preparation of food for cooking.
Cooking was still carried out over an open fire although these people did now have pots in which food could be cooked. Most of the cooking and eating was done inside the houses. There was still no proper chimney and the smoke was left to escape via a small opening in the roof.
The big change from the Mesolithic people was that these people, as farmers, had grain crops. This meant that they had to find ways of grinding the grain and the saddle quern was widely used.
Two types of rock are associated with querns; saddle querns were usually made of local granite while rotary querns were made from white sandstone. The saddle quern consisted of a large, slightly sloping base stone on which grain was placed and then ground with a single stone.
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