This sandstone seed-grinding top stone, or ‘muller’, is from near Bourke in western New South Wales.  The muller was made from dense, hard sandstone or quartzite.  The stone is from the traditional country of the Ngemba people, and is probably less than 2000 years old.

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A ‘muller’ is the top stone used to grind seeds on a sandstone grinding stone.  Mullers occur in a range of morphologies which varied according to the the seed-grinding technique. This muller is made from hard sandstone or quartzite which likely influenced how it was used.  The stone was pushed away from the user, who applied their body weight against the edge of the muller with the heel of one or both hands, grinding the hard seeds between the top and bottom stones. The stone was rotated from time-to-time, and attrition created facets around the edges and on both faces of this artefact.  Perhaps due to the hardness of the stone, most of the attrition on this muller occurred at the tool’s edges, leaving the centre less worn.  The wear facets are less distinctively organised than on mullers where attrition extended to the centre of the face.

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Grinding stones like this were critical tools for subsisting in the arid zone of Australia during the Holocene period.  Aboriginal people used them to grind native grass seeds into flour.  Grinding stones were often made at quarries associated with sacred storylines, and the stones were extensively traded throughout the arid zone.

Quarries for grinding stones are present in the Gunderbooka Range near Bourke in outback New South Wales, 75-100 km east and southeast of where this grinding stone was found.  Extensive sandstone quarries are present on Oombi Oombi (Mount Oxley) and Yambacoona (Mount Druid), both of which are sacred sites on storylines.  Archaeologists recorded 370 quarry pits at Yambacoona.  Here Aboriginal people wedged sandstone slabs from bedrock to produce blanks measuring about 10-50 cm in maximum dimension, with most around 20 cm long.  Charles Sturt explored the region in 1828 and mistook the quarry pits on Oombi Oombi as natural phenomena, created by ‘eddies of water’, despite his observation that the sandstone slabs ‘. . . were as clean as if they had only just been turned out of the hand of the mason’.