Bullaun Stones

In my post about eating acorns, I said that people had to invent quite a few things in order to move from eating acorns as occasional snacks to eating acorns as staple starch food. One of these acorn eating inspired inventions was a grinding stone. At the moment the earliest dated grinding stones were found in Upper Paleolithic sites in China (found to have been used for grinding plant food including acorns) and in Mesolithic sites in Morocco and Levant (found to have been used for grinding plant food including acorns). But I firmly believe that even earlier ones will be found. Also the latest paleobotanical data actually confirms that the food traces found on the grinding stones found in a lot of early "agricultural" sites were actually of acorns, which meant that the grinding stones in these societies were primarily used for grinding acorns. 

Thousands of these grinding stones are found all over North America and they are always clasified as acorn grinding stones because we know from the ethnographic evidence that this is what they were used for.

Exactly the same stones are found in their thousands in Ireland, where they are called bullaun stone but they are also found scattered accross the rest of Europe too. But while in North America, these stones are classified as grinding stones, in Europe we "don't know what they are and what they were originally made for".  

Now am i the only one who sees similarity between the acorn grinding stones from North America and bullaun stones? Have a look for yourself and let me know what you think. If any of the Irish bullaun stones was found in North America, they would have been immediately classified as acorn grinding stones. How is it possible that "we still don't the precise original use of these stones"? Ireland was once covered with mighty oak forests and people who lived in these oak forests must have eaten acorns like all the other oak forest dwellers did. And if we find the same type of hollowed stones in Ireland that we find in North America, and if in North America these stones were used for grinding acorns, then these Irish stones must have been used for the same purpose. 

I believe that bullaun stones were not classified as acorn grinding stones primarily because until very recently we did not realise how ubiquitous consumption of acorns was in the northern hemisphere. Maybe its time to re-evaluate the bullaun stones and reclassify them as acorn grinding stones. I also believe that the earliest examples of bullaun stones probably date to Mesolithic and Neolithic time and that they predate the arrival of agriculture to Ireland.. 

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