Microfossils and Micro-XRF: sourcing raw materials for Iron Age to Romano-British pottery production at Burrough Hill hillfort, UK

Summary

Burrough Hill hillfort, east Leicestershire, United Kingdom, is an example of an Iron Age settlement of the Corieltauvi people who occupied the East Midlands in the millennium prior to the Roman occupation of Britain in AD 43. The hillfort is set in a sedimentary landscape with few distinctive rock types. Objectives of the current study are to determine signatures of the local sedimentary deposits, building materials and pottery using ceramic petrography, micropalaeontology, WDXRF and micro-XRF. To this end 100 samples were taken of scored ware, calcite-gritted ware and mixed-gritted ware from the site dating from mid- to late Iron Age through the transition into the Romano-British period. Shell and quartz rich pottery fabrics are present in each phase of occupation. There are, however, differences in composition, sorting and packing of inclusions that reflect the use of particular sources or methods of clay processing. The microfossil assemblage points to a raw materials source in glacial deposits of the Oadby Till, which crops out east of the hillfort. The pottery is compared with contemporary shell-tempered wares from the neighboring eastern region.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Advances in the Method and Application of Ceramic Petrography: international perspectives on key archaeological questions, Part I

Keywords

Spatial Coverage