23rd July 2011, 11:44 PM
(This post was last modified: 23rd July 2011, 11:47 PM by Stuart Rathbone.)
Funnily enough i was talking about that with some Archaeologists from Wisconsin a few weeks back! In Ireland we have huge numbers of burnt stone mounds, horrible soggy bloody things lol. However it's almost exclusively sandstone that's used. the mountain we are working on is quartzite and shist with huge quartz seems and there is no sandstone nearby so we did have a think about that when the guys from the US said they had Burnt Mound equivalents over there using quartz. I didn't know Welsh ones used quartz! That must look amazing. Irish Burnt Mounds tend to have about 80 to 90% stone in a sooty black soil, and that's not the sort of quantities we're talking about here, the quartz isn't occurring in that sort of density. How dense do you find your burnt quartz mounds? Perhaps the quartz could be used as pot boilers and this would lead to the sort of density we are finding, but I'm not sure.
Oh, and I should mention that the only deposits that aren't producing large quantities of the quartz are the burnt fill of the stone box and the immediately overlying layer of burnt material!
Yeah Fulacht Beer....ummm sooty lol
Oh, and I should mention that the only deposits that aren't producing large quantities of the quartz are the burnt fill of the stone box and the immediately overlying layer of burnt material!
Yeah Fulacht Beer....ummm sooty lol