Comparative petrography of pottery sherds and potential geological source materials in the East Midlands

This report forms part of the Prehistoric Pottery Project, which is aimed at investigating by means of petrographic and electron microprobe analyses the production and distribution of later prehistoric granodiorite-tempered pottery from the East Midlands. Earlier petrographic studies have identified potential production sources in rocks cropping out in the Mountsorrel area of Charnwood Forest (Knight et al., 2003) and it is intended to test this hypothesis by the application of electron microprobe analyses, combined with additional thin section petrography. This is envisaged as the first stage of a 2-phase project, which in the second stage will examine the potential of isotope analysis for refining our knowledge of sources of potting clays and temper.