A sickle is a curved blade usually used to cut many stalks of a plant at once. Sickles are widely used to cut grasses. Very large sickles are called scythes.
Neolithic sickle blades were typically a composite of small stone blades that were hafted in a long row into a handle and used much as modern sickles are used.
Although sickles are used to cut reeds and grasses used for many purposes, most archaeological interest in sickles has focused on their relationship to early grain harvesting for food. Stalks of ripe cereals, as well as many wild grasses and reeds, contain silica, which has abrasive properties and tends to produce microscopic scratches on the sickle blade, imparting a kind of shine — called "sickle sheen" — that does not result from other uses of a blade. Thus archaeologists are able to establish that any given blade was or was not used to cut cereal or grass stalks.
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| Large flint sickle balde mounted for cutting, shown with Einnkorn, an early cultivated wheat. The presence of microscopic "sickle sheen" on the stone blade can be evience that it has been used for cutting high-silica grass stems. Hunterian Museum, Glasgow |
It is unlikely that sickles would have been used to cut stalks of wild grain, for a sickle would be a clumsy instrument to use on wild, fractionating kinds of grain, which would be lost when the stalk was agitated. A sickle in an archaeological site therefore usually is taken to indicate either that grasses were being cut for their stalks (to use as fuel or building materials, for example) or that domesticated cereals were being harvested from which the grain would be detached after cutting.
Authorities differ on the best interpretation of sickle evidence in different sites, but, in general, sickles are most likely to indicate domesticated cereals if they are accompanied by grinding stones (millstones) in the same site. (Grinding stones do not themselves necessarily indicate that grain is being raised, since they may have other uses, but they are a necessary implement for cracking off and removing the chaff of most cereal.)