SESSION 3 – Stone tool production and processing techniques
The Barranco Cardones workshop (Arucas, Gran Canaria). An example of knapping vesicular basalt for making rotary querns

Rotary querns were important utensils in everyday life on the island of Gran Canaria in pre-European times. They are ubiquitous in archaeological sites (both domestic and storage places). These artefacts have been the object of previous studies in the Canary Islands, but aspects of their production process only began to be researched more recently. To do this, the role of the quarries, as production centers for rotary querns with a clear intention of creating surpluses, will be taken as the focus of attention. In a first stage, the quarries were identified and described, and secondly the specific provenance of the raw materials has been studied, and is still on-going. Volcanic tuff (compacted lapilli) was a very important raw material used to make these artefacts (Rodríguez-Rodríguez et al., 2004), it has been our main object of research during the last years. But recently we had discovered not only vesicular basalt quarries, but also a specific workshop to shape this type of tool.