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Description: | Half of the upper stone from a greisen rotary quern, semi-circular in plan and sub-rectangular in section. The upper surface shows the stepped central hopper or recess, and one of the sections has a cylindrical aperture which was half of the socket for slotting a wooden handle into the stone quern. The handle would have allowed the upper section of the two-part quern to be rotated over the base section, with the grain between the two, so that it was ground into flour. This quern fragment was found along with other fragments of greisen and granite rotary querns in a field where an earlier hedge has been moved so that these fragments my have been incorporated into this hedge in the past, and have since been strewn around the field. The greisen probably derives from the nearby outcrop which flanks the granite at Tregonning Hill in Breage. The greisen is coarse with prominent mica flakes with ragged edges up to 7 mm across and coarser quartz grains up to 10 mm across set in a finer matrix of quartz and mica with black tourmaline inclusions. The fine-grained inclusion in the broken section of the quern is an original slate xenolith, also now greisenised, in the pre-greisen granite which has trapped an accumulation of tourmaline on one side. Greisen is an altered granite where the felspar has disappeared and been replaced by white mica, which is also soft, and the dark inclusions are tourmaline, which is hard, creating an undulating surface which is better for grinding (Roger Taylor pers comm).Romano-British periodQuinnell (2004) illustrates a similar upper stone from a rotary quern, excavated at Trethurgy, on page 145, Fig.70, No.S42, which was broken before the late 4th century AD.
Original Image | Publisher: | http://finds.org.uk | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Identifier: | http://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/r... | Go to resource |
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