安徽何郢遗址植物残体切割形态与脱粒农具的关系

石器和植物残体的相关研究证明,脱粒板曾大规模应用于近东地区。为探索古代中国或远东是否也曾使用过这种工具或类似工具,本研究对何郢遗址植物残体形态进行了研究,结果表明中国商周遗址存在切割形态植物残体的证据,以此推测类似脱粒板的农具在商周时期曾被使用。无疑,这一发现对我国古代农作物的脱粒加工方式具有重要的启示,可望深化我国农业考古的探索。     

Insights from a tribological analysis of the tribulum

Since the 1980s, “strange” microwear traces were found to occur on flint blades from sites in the Near East from the late Neolithic and occurring in great abundance by the Early Bronze Age. Although these were considered by archaeologists to be sickles because they had visible gloss on their edges, their use-traces could not be reproduced in harvesting experiments carried out in the field. Subsequently, several lines of evidence were used to study the blades, including not only direct observation of microscopic wear traces, but also Near Eastern cuneiform texts from the third and second millennium BC describing agricultural instruments and analogy with ethnographic and experimental reference material. We found that these tools and their traces best matched traces on flint used to arm the underside of a tribulum (threshing sledge) for threshing grain and cutting straw. We built a replica of the tribulum described in cuneiform texts from the Bronze Age, using copies of the Bronze Age blades, and used this instrument in experiments.