Importing, imitating and assimilating innovation: New aspects of the penetration of the rotary quern into Gaul during the Late Iron Age

• The adoption of the rotary mill in Gaul goes through a phase of imitation. • The widespread use of iron in stone craft led to the development of the rotary mill. • The same quarries often switched from saddle querns to rotary querns. With particularly solid witnesses, the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula seems to be at the origin of a major technical innovation that will have a strong posterity for milling systems. The first rotary querns appeared there in the Iron Age, at the end of the 6th or beginning of the 5th century BCE, and they were already produced and used in southern Gaul by the 4th century, before being globally adopted in Gaul in the second half of the 3rd century BCE. Although the adoption of this innovation is now well mapped in Gaul in increasingly well-dated contexts, the factors and modalities of its adoption remained obscure so far. It is easy to assume that an idea could circulate as well as an object, thanks to information networks that were particularly developed in Iron Age Europe. Not to mention the circulation of the craftsmen themselves. Today, in addition to data providing a reliable statistical basis for the anthropological study of technologies, a few archaeological cases provide some answers to these problems in central-eastern and northern Gaul, highlighting a phenomenon of assimilation of innovation through stages of import and imitation of exogenous objects. Once a particularly efficient tool has arrived in a territory, a rock resembling the imported material is sought locally. One or two generations later, once the innovation has been assimilated by local craftsmen, a return to previously mastered rocks is often observed, revealing an attachment to effective regional materials. The choice of specific rocks is very important, and the complexity of the shape of the final product is linked to the tools used to cut it. The use of metal in craftsmanship had already been widespread for several centuries, and led to the specialization of workshops that initially developed standardized forms of saddle querns. The real vector facilitating the diffusion of the rotary quern was therefore the stone workers themselves who ensured the manufacture of the new rotary mills. This means that without the prior presence of saddle quern quarries with workers possessing a high degree of know-how, and without the use of metal tools, the spread of rotary mills throughout Gaul would not have been possible. The success of the rotary mill in Western Europe must therefore be attributed to a combination of factors, at the same time material, human and conceptual.