Acorn Mortars / Bread From Acorns - #nehssie

When I was in Pennsylvania, my new buddy Jeff was often showing me acorn grinding stones, aka, mortars. At the time I didn’t fully grasp the idea as I’d never heard it before, nor had I seen anything like what he was showing me, but after stumbling upon the old video included later in this segment it became imperative to put a full report together for this particular type of stone feature.

Jeff mentioned learning about acorns when he was out in California, as evidence had been found there of what is now known as the California Indian Acorn Culture. California’s a long way from Pennsylvania, so let me interject here with a comment from biologist & herbalist John Slattery, author of the book Southwest Foraging. John says: “No other food has sustained the human race to such an extent as the acorn. If you took a gigantic table and laid out all the foods humans have eaten across the globe and over time, making an individual pile for each foodstuff, acorns would be, by far, the largest pile on the table.”

Wow, that’s quite a statement! But when you consider that there are over 600 species of oak worldwide, with about 90 species in the United States alone, that images of oak trees, leaves and acorns are found in cultures around the world and countries such as England, Estonia, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, the U.S., Spain’s Basque region, and Wales have adopted the oak tree as a national symbol, that statement suddenly sounds much more believable.

[SmartHunts]

That was very informative. Thank you Matt!

[whatabouttheearth]

You had never heard of a mortar and pestle?

The book 'Native American Ethnobotany' by Moerman talks about many tribes usage of Quercus by species.