Pestle

A pestle is a hand-held stone for pounding and crushing in a mortar or on a slab. Fowke (1896) sorted the Bureau of Ethnology pestles into six forms: long, nearly cylindrical rollers; cones and truncated cones; roughly conical cobbles with only the corners pecked off; unshaped cobbles worn convex at both ends; carefully pecked cylinders with a flat base and domed top; and short forms with an expanding base. Long slender cylinders are common in the East; California pestles taper upward and may have a ridge near the base or a knob on top (Hodge 1910).

Many pestles are natural elongated cobbles used with little change. Others were roughed out by percussion flaking, pecked to shape with a hammerstone and smoothed by grinding; in replication experiments the final pecking took about 11.5 hours per pestle on average (Schneider and Osborne 1996). Common stones are quartzite, granite, sandstone, argillite, slate and diorite (Fowke 1896).

Wear sits on the working end, which is either rubbed smooth or battered rough from pounding (Fowke 1896). Ethnographic and archaeological sources list acorns and other nuts, seeds, roots, dried meat, paint minerals and pottery temper as materials crushed with pestles (Hodge 1907; Glassow 1996). The key trait is an elongated stone with use wear concentrated on one or both ends.

Length about 150–460 mm and diameter about 50 mm for the long cylindrical form (Fowke 1896, converted from inches). Eastern cylinders often reach 610 mm with a diameter rarely over 76 mm, and California pestles run from a few inches to nearly 915 mm (Hodge 1910, converted from inches); Yurok pestles are usually about 305 mm (Kroeber 1925). A Columbia River pestle at the Metropolitan Museum measures 194 × 83 mm. Minnesota roller pestles are often 150–200 mm long, some over 300 mm, and 50–70 mm in diameter (Morrow 2016).

Found across most of North America, from the Eastern Woodlands to the Great Basin, Plateau, Northwest Coast and California, where pestles are most numerous and varied. They are scarce in the Pueblo Southwest, where the metate and mano were used instead, and in parts of the South with little stone (Hodge 1910).

Identification tips: Look for smoothing, polish or battering on the end of the stone rather than on a broad face. Many pestles are lightly altered river cobbles, so the worn end is often the only sign of use.

Similar types: A Mano (Handstone) is worn on a flat face from back-and-forth grinding, not on its end. A Bell Pestle is short with a broad, flared, flat base. A Hammerstone is battered all around its edges and is not shaped into a long body.

Naming: Fowke (1896) and Moorehead (1910) both note that some long, soft-stone forms with pointed or decorated ends may be rollers rather than pestles; Morrow (2016) found little wear on the ends of Minnesota roller pestles and suggests they were rolled on metates. The Seneca used one word for pestle and mortar, marked "upper" and "lower" (Hodge 1910).

Dating evidence: The earliest well-dated California set, 57 pestles from CA-SBA-53 on the Goleta Slough, comes from deposits dated 4,980–4,620 B.P.; those are barely shaped cobbles, while tapered, pecked pestles appear after about 4,500 B.P. (Glassow 1996).