Production and exchange of Early Medieval granodiorite tempered pottery
Eddy Faber
Granitoid-tempered pottery is a distinctive fabric for early medieval pottery in the East Midlands, first identified in the pottery from Kingston-upon-Soar (Barley 1957), and is important for addressing questions of regional trade or exchange in pottery. Much analytical work has been undertaken to study this fabric, mostly by means of thin section petrography, and has concluded that much of the pottery either derives from the granodiorite or quartz diorite sources around Mountsorrel in the Charnwood region of Leicestershire, or may derive from material present in glacial erratics (Barley 1957, Williams and Vince 1997, Ixer and Vince 2009).
Recent work on granitoid-tempered later prehistoric pottery in the East Midlands has suggested that chemical compositional analysis of the granitoid inclusions may further the discrimination between the rock source(s) (Knight et al. 2003). This work aims to investigate the movement of this pottery by comparing the granitoid inclusions in the pottery with geological specimens of the potential source rocks of Mountsorrel granodiorite and South Leicestershire quartz diorite. This approach is currently being applied to two assemblages:
Lowes Farm 120231: prominent minerals include perthitic alkali feldspar (dark bands Na-feldspar, lighter bands K-feldspar), quartz, plagioclase, iron oxides, and altered hornblende.
South Leicestershire Diorites: prominent minerals include altered hornblende, quartz, iron-titanium oxides, K- and Na-feldspars, plagioclase.