Threshing Board

A threshing board, also called a tribulum, is a now obsolete implement made of a thick, slatted board with stone flakes or metal blades set into its underside and a curved, sled like front end so it could be dragged. Farmers pulled it in circles over grain spread on a threshing floor, usually behind a draft animal, and the sharp flakes or blades cut the stalks while the weight of the board and its rider separated the grain from the straw. Archaeological finds place threshing boards in the Near East and the Balkans at least 8,000 years ago, and Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets from around 3350 BC already record the tool; it spread across the Mediterranean and the Middle East and, through Carthaginian contact, to the Iberian Peninsula, surviving in Mediterranean and Islamic farming long after it vanished from most of Western Europe, and Spanish craftsmen kept building them until mechanized agriculture finally ended the practice in the 1950s and 1960s.