Daatê - The stone grinder Not only common in Goan households a few decades back, this handmade stone grinder was in use for the past many generations till milling operations/chakkis began during the 19th century. Most Indian homes including those in Goa used this traditional grinding method to make flour of different cereals and grains. In Goa, some remote villages along the border, practice this method of making flour till date. The process involves rotating the stones in circles which required a lot of strength and energy. Women of the house would usually practice this. Activities like grinding stones for flours, pulling up water from the wells, grinding masalas/coconut/batter in rolling or rotating stone, use of mortar and pestle for making flour, batter etc kept people of the previous generations automatically fit and strong. I discovered a number of such grinding stones buried around the periphery of our ancestral house at Quepem, some of them, more than 200years old....