more interesting forms

Here are a couple of interesting forms, they're mortars for grinding grain. Today its easy for us to forget that our ancestors, in this case ancestors from China and the Phillipines, couldn't just go to the store to buy flour or grain already ground, they often had to do it themselves using tools like these.
The pounding and grinding of grain day after day would disintegrate anything but the hardiest woods, such is the case with these two mortars, the darker one weighs about 90 lbs. and could use another 100 years of grinding easily.