Tools & tillage: a journal on the history of the implements of cultivation and other agricultural processes (6.1988/1991)

A METHOD FOR IDENTIFYING GRAIN
STORAGE TECHNIQUES AND ITS
APPLICATION FOR EUROPEAN
AGRICULTURAL HISTORY
By

Francois SigauF'

Except for a few special cases, staple foods,
especially grain, have usually to be kept some
time in storage before being consumed, so
that their preservation is a matter of impor-
tance almost everywhere. Yet in comparison
with the other stages in the acquisition of
food - tillage, planting, harvesting, process-
ing - storage seems to have been somewhat
neglected by scholars. It was only in the mid
1970s, for example, that economists and other
experts working in developing countries
came to realize that losses due to bad storage
conditions could make all their efforts to in-
crease yields pointless.1 As far as history and
anthropology are concerned, Marceau Gast
and I became aware of a similar discrepancy
at approximately the same time. The social
importance of food and grain storage had al-
ways been understood by some scholars, but
serious studies were few and far between,
with practically no comparative work to
speak of. What were the causes of this sit-
uation, and what could we do about it?2
A full discussion of causes is not in order
here, but some deserve to be mentioned
briefly. Thus, the disappearance of famines in
Western Europe was a factor: it is surprising
to observe how quickly grain storage, as a
matter of public debate, vanished after about
''Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences, Paris

1850.' But the remoteness of scholars from
grass-root realities may well have been more
important yet. For example, V. Gordon
Childe himself seems to have adhered to the
widespread belief that the conservation of
grains is “easy”, only forethought, thrift, and
convenient receptacles being necessary.4
Granted, grains keep more easily than most
other kinds of food, and technical improve-
ments in the course of the last 150 years have
made their conservation easier still. But it
takes a complete ignorance of those very im-
provements to extend to all places and times a
result that has been attained in the last dec-
ades and in areas of temperate climate only.
Indeed, the prevailing opinion in the early
19th century was exactly the opposite of
Childe’s. Here are, for example, the first few
lines of Des fosses propres d conserver les
grains ..., a book published in 1819 by one of
the main French industrial writer of the time,
C.-P. de Lasteyrie:
“Grains being very susceptible of getting
spoiled or lost by the effects of atmospheric
variations, by moistness, and by the ravages
of insects, the first agricultural peoples must
have looked for the means to conserve a pro-
duce that was their only, or at least their main
subsistence; so the invention of fosses d ble
[corn pits], which seems, and indeed is, the
simplest of all that have ever been tried, dates