University of Birmingham Microfossil-determined provenance of clay building materials at Burrough Hill Iron Age hill fort, Leicestershire, England Williams, Mark; Wilkinson, Ian; Taylor, Jeremy; Whitbread, Ian; Stamp, Rebecca; Boomer, Ian; Yates, Emma; Stocker, Christopher DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2014.03.028 License: Creative Commons: Attribution (CC BY) Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Citation for published version (Harvard): Williams, M, Wilkinson, I, Taylor, J, Whitbread, I, Stamp, R, Boomer, I, Yates, E & Stocker, C 2015, 'Microfossil- determined provenance of clay building materials at Burrough Hill Iron Age hill fort, Leicestershire, England', Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 54, pp. 329-339. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2014.03.028 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: Eligibility for repository : checked 09/06/2014 General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive. If you believe that this is the case for this document, please contact [email protected] providing details and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate. Download date: 03. Oct. 2021 Journal of Archaeological Science xxx (2014) 1e11 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Archaeological Science journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jas Microfossil-determined provenance of clay building materials at Burrough Hill Iron Age hill fort, Leicestershire, England Mark Williams a,*, Ian Wilkinson a,b, Jeremy Taylor c, Ian Whitbread c, Rebecca Stamp a, Ian Boomer d, Emma Yates a, Christopher Stocker a a Department of Geology, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK b British Geological Survey, Keyworth, Nottingham NG12 5GG, UK c School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK d School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK article info abstract Article history: The Iron Age hill fort at Burrough Hill, Leicestershire, eastern England, lies in a lowland landscape of Available online xxx Mesozoic sedimentary rocks comprising mudstones with thin limestone units, sandstones and iron- stones, which are blanketed by Pleistocene till. During the late Iron Age the hill fort was an important Keywords: central place; permanent occupation probably began in EarlyeMiddle Iron Age and continued into the Iron Age hill fort Roman period. A variety of materials in archaeological contexts from the site, including clay rampart Burrough Hill bonding and the clay linings of storage pits and floors, are found to yield characteristically mixed Eastern England microfossil assemblages of Early to Late Jurassic ostracods and foraminifera, together with foraminifera Microfossils Provenance from the Late Cretaceous. These provide a unique microfossil signature that indicate provenance from the local till. Microfossils can also be recovered from Middle to Late Iron Age potsherds at Burrough Hill, and these too suggest a local glacial source for the clay. Our analysis demonstrates the power of microfossils to provenance clay materials used for construction and manufactures at an Iron Age site, where a detailed baseline understanding of the local geology is firmly established. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Here we use microfossils to analyze the provenance of clays used in construction at Burrough Hill Iron Age hill fort, East Lei- Microfossils can be recovered from a wide variety of sedimen- cestershire. We also use our microfossil database to make a pro- tary rocks including limestone, sandstones and mudstones, and are visional assessment of microfossils in the pottery at the site. commonly used by geologists to determine the relative ages of Burrough Hill lies in a lowland landscape of Mesozoic sedimentary rocks (Armstrong and Brasier, 2005), a process based on the prin- rock deposits, mainly mudstones and limestone, covered with ciple that all microfossil species have a distinct temporal range. Pleistocene glacial deposits. The hill fort occupies a geographically Coupled with the knowledge of the spatial distribution of particular central site in Britain, and during the Late Iron Age was a major rock strata, microfossils can then be used to determine the prove- centre for the local population. Archaeological materials that are nance of sedimentary rock materials in archaeological and histor- made of clay at the hill fort include pottery and clay linings of walls, ical materials (e.g. Perch-Nielsen, 1972; Horrocks and Best, 2004; floors and storage pits. Microfossils have been recovered from all of Quinn and Day, 2007; Wilkinson et al., 2008, 2010, 2013; Tasker these materials and, coupled with a detailed study of the local and et al., 2011, 2013). Microfossils are especially useful in this context regional geology, provide a robust indication of the sourcing of because of their abundance in small samples, and they have materials for pottery and building at the site. particular value in landscapes where the underlying rock strata are lithologically uniform over wide areas, but that are characterized by stratigraphically distinctive fossils. 2. Archaeological setting Burrough Hill is a large univallate (single walled) Iron Age hill fort located approximately 7 km south of the town of Melton fi * Corresponding author. Mowbray in Leicestershire (Fig. 1). It is the nest surviving example E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Williams). of a hill fort in Leicestershire and is defined by a trapezoidal http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2014.03.028 0305-4403/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Please cite this article in press as: Williams, M., et al., Microfossil-determined provenance of clay building materials at Burrough Hill Iron Age hill fort, Leicestershire, England, Journal of Archaeological Science (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2014.03.028 2 M. Williams et al. / Journal of Archaeological Science xxx (2014) 1e11 Fig. 1. Geographical and geological context of the Iron Age hill fort at Burrough Hill, Leicestershire, UK: the underlying bedrock geology is of Early Jurassic age, with Pleistocene deposits of Anglian age lying to the immediate east of the hill fort. These latter deposits are the likely source of construction materials within the hill fort and may also have been used as a source of clay for Iron Age pottery at the site. Map redrawn from British Geological Survey (2007). rampart of stone, clay and turf, standing up to 3 m high internally the UK. Burrough Hill is one of only a few in the East Midlands, and that encloses an area of around 5 ha (Figs. 2 and 3). in the absence of recent research and excavation our understanding Burrough Hill has attracted the interest of antiquarians and ar- of their significance remains poor. chaeologists since the 16th century and during the twentieth Partly in order to address this problem, the University of century saw successive small-scale excavations in 1935, 1960, 1967 Leicester established a 5-year research and training project at and 1970e71. This work attested to occupation on the site from the Burrough Hill in 2010. The initial large-scale geophysical survey of Neolithic through to the 4th century AD, but apart from some short the site was followed by an excavation programme that has so far notes it remained unpublished and so added little to our knowledge systematically sampled several areas of the hill fort including the of the site’s role (Taylor et al., 2012, p. 49). In the intervening years main gateway into the fort, the ramparts and both intra and the significance of this caveat became all the more apparent as extramural settlement (Fig. 2). Excavations in 2010 (trench 1) and developer funded archaeology since the 1990s has transformed our 2011 (trench 4) investigated the main SE entrance into the hill fort understanding of other features of the later prehistoric landscapes marked today by monumental in-turned banks that create a of the East Midlands (cf. Willis, 2006). Although hill forts are iconic passageway ca 40 m long. Trenches 1 and 4 were positioned over monuments of the Iron Age, their distribution is uneven through the southern side of this entrance passageway in order to Please cite this article in press as: Williams, M., et al., Microfossil-determined provenance of clay building materials at Burrough Hill Iron Age hill fort, Leicestershire, England, Journal of Archaeological Science (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2014.03.028 M. Williams et al. / Journal of Archaeological Science xxx (2014) 1e11 3 Fig. 2. Position of trenches within and adjacent to the hill fort excavated between 2010 and 2012. Microfossil-bearing clay materials documented here are from trenches 3 to 6 (see Table 1). Fig. 3. Aerial view of the hill fort at Burrough Hill taken from the northeast: for orientation with Fig.