This sandstone seed-grinding top stone, or ‘muller’, is from the Murray-Darling river basin in western New South Wales.  The muller was made from the broken end of a seed grinding dish.  The stone 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. 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 180 degrees from time-to-time, and attrition created two adjacent facets on one face of this artefact.  The opposite face of the muller preserves a deep concave wear facet, indicating that it was made from a recycled end of a broken grinding stone.  This attests to the high quality of this sandstone for seed grinding.

See the annotations for technological details about this stone tool.

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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’.