The remains of a grain mill which belonged to Revolutionary War figure George Rogers Clark may have been found in Clarksville, Indiana (a city named after him).

November’s discovery left the team of researchers excited, said Cheryl Munson, an Indiana University archaeologist overseeing the high-tech imaging and excavations in a 280-acre historic district along Clarksville’s riverfront.

She said the team picked up reflections from ground-penetrating radar that indicated a manmade foundation composed of stone or brick lies beneath the site.

“We are definitely excited about that,” said Jane Sarles, president of the Clarksville Historical Society.

The find was made along Mill Creek not far from the Ohio River in an area “that looks most promising” as the likely location of the mill that was a cornerstone of Clark’s original settlement just across the river from Louisville, Ky.

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A teacher in England has baked bread using ancient grain developed by an archaeological botanist.

Mr Letts developed the grain in frustration at the modern types of wheat grown in the UK, which produce straw too short for use as roofing thatch. He believed using older varieties where you could get two products from the land was better for the environment.

He scoured gene banks and traditional farms across the world to track down tall varieties of wheat, like those grown in medieval times.

He said: “After so many years of struggling to research this and develop it, I think it’s catching on.”
The grain is being grown on farms at Faringdon and Wheatley, producing 1.3 tonnes of grain per acre plus the same weight in thatching straw.

He said: “I think the bread’s delicious and most people really like it.

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Excavations in Jordan have turned up the world’s oldest known granaries.

…In a paper appearing in the June 23 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, Kuijt and Bill Finlayson, director, Council for British Research in the Levant, describe recent excavations at Dhra’ near the Dead Sea in Jordan that provide evidence of granaries that precede the emergence of fully domesticated plants and large-scale sedentary communities by at least 1,000 years.

“These granaries reflect new forms of risk reduction, intensification and low-level food production,” Kuijt said. “People in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Age (11,500 to 10,550 B.C.) were not using new food sources, but rather, by developing new storage methods, they altered their relationship with traditionally utilized food resources and created the technological context for later development of domesticated plants and an agro-pastoralist economy.

“Building granaries may, at the same time, have been the single most important feature in increasingly sedentism that required active community participation in new life-ways.”

Designed with suspended floors for air circulation and protection from rodents, the granaries are located between residential structures that contain plant-processing instillations.

A food granary dating back to over 11,300-years-ago has been found in Jordan, indicating that people were storing grain long before they learned to domesticate crops.

That’s as much as a thousand years before people in the Middle East domesticated grain, the research team led by anthropologist Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame said.

Remains of wild barley were found in the structure, indicating that the grain was collected and saved even though formal cultivation had not yet developed.

The granary was between two other structures used for grain processing and residences, discovered in excavations at Dhra’, near the Dead Sea. The granary was round with walls of stone and mud. The researchers said it had a raised floor for air circulation and protection from rodents.