127 728
ediciones
Cambios
sin resumen de edición
<languages></languages>
== Introduction ==
In Zeanuri (B), it was reported that many measures by weighted coexisted with the Decimal System, which became mandatory in the second decade of the 20th century. Up until then, for example, stone weights were used in the mills even though they were officially banned. Weights of that type, with add-ons in the forms of rings or irons stuck to the handle can still be seen in some local mills.
In the last decades of the 20th century, a good number of measurement units still continued to be used in some places. These included the ''obrero'' or ''gizalana'' (the amount of land one worker could work in a day) as an area unit, the ''cántara ''or pitcher for wine, and the ''azumbre'' (roughly half a gallon), pound and liquid quart for wine, milk and oil. ''Fanegas ''(Spanish bushels) and ''celemines'' (smaller bushels with 12 to 1 ''fanega) '') were used for grain, flour and potatoes. Many of those measures have lost their currency and even the oldest people surveyed who had used them found it hard to accurately remember them.
The measures collected and described in the field research of the surveyed locations often required a tool to measure. Some, but obviously not all, the homesteads had some measurement instruments.
== The human body as a yardstick ==
The human body is the source of some units such as the inch (from the adult thumb which is about an inch wide), the hand span or palm (half a cubit), the fathom (6 feet) or foot, along with others unknown in the territory studied<ref>So much so that if we consider the names of the traditional measurements of length and the proportions between them, we recall Leonardo da Vinci’s well-known drawing, the Vitruvian Man. The fathom would be equivalent to the distance between the tips of both outstretched hand, while that would coincide with the height, and as both are equal, would form a square. The fathom is two yards, so that the length of the latter is the distance between the sternum and the end of the hand; if the arm is bent so the tips of the fingers touch the centre of the chest, the distance is a cubit, half a yard; four palms or spans make a cubit, the same as three feet or a third of a yard. The surface area contained in the square formed by the extended arms and height of the man is the square fathom and if the side of the square is not six feet but rather seven, as can be seen from the bibliography cited in this book, that square times one hundred would be equivalent to an ''obrero.'' .</ref>. Furthermore, it is also common to find people taking measurements using their fingers, hand with fingers outstretched, i.e., the hand span or palm, the foot or step, without their thinking in measurement units that are in anyway comparable to those of the metric system, but rather taking those parts of the body as the yardstick.
In the Valle de Carranza (B), some terms related to the human body were found to be measurement units. The people surveyed said that an inch is the distance between the tip of the thumb and the first joint when the thumb is bent and the hand span or palm the distance between the tips of the thumb and ring finger of the outstretched hand.
The people surveyed in Carranza explain that to calculate a metre without resorting to any mechanical device and using their own body as the benchmark, they stretch out their arm horizontally to one side and a metre is the distance between the tip of the fingers of the outstretched hand from the start of the other arm. In a similar way, the ''vara'' or yard is the gap between the tip of the fingers and the start of the outstretched arm.
{{DISPLAYTITLE: XIII. MEASUREMENT UNITS}} {{#bookTitle:Agriculture in the Basque Country|Agricultura_en_vasconia/en}}