Sunday, August 23, 2020

Iron Age Dairy Processing Tool Found in Scotland

From Archaeology Magazine comes a short article about a recent find in Loch Tay in the central highlands of Scotland.  The find resembles part of a wooden, trough-shaped dish with holes in the bottom.  But the dish bottom contained remains of dairy fat--suggesting that it might have been used to separate butter from buttermilk.  The dish is estimated to be about 2,500 years old and would have been used during Scotland's Iron Age.  

Finds like this one are important, not just for the clues they provide as to what kinds of foods were eaten, but because they give us information about how foods were made in prehistoric times.  It is pleasant to think of early Scots using butter, and to speculate on the types of bread they might have used it on.  

2 comments:

  1. What a cool find. Presumably it was ueed to drain the newly formed butter.

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    1. Probably. It makes me wonder what other types of cooking and food preparation tools were used in prehistory that we *don't* know about.

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