From Jonathon Chapman:
I was up at Whitehall Villa on Thursday and Friday - I was wondering whether the stone might be a stone on which to clean clothes . It is logical to think that clothes or towels might be washed or beaten clean around a bath house or earlier around a spring .Â
From Rick Whyte:
Reminds me of metal working/ sword sharpening stones found at Vindolanda...
Smooth surfaces with various scratch marks. Especially as it is in the vicinity of the hammer scale area.
Further from Rick Whyte:
Whetstone (at Pentrwyn Bronze Age Metalworking Site, Great Orme)
The whetstone was retrieved from the upper fill (026) of the pit 025. The stone surface is uniform "light olive grey" (Munsell: 5Y6/1) in colour, and its well defined orthogonal shape is determined by a major and two minor planar joint surfaces. It has a uniform fine grained texture (grain size 0.1-0.2mm) with quartz, felspar and biotite visible, together with occasional blebs of pyrite: it would appear to be fine grained silicic/intermediate igneous rock such as a microgranite.
The whetstone showed several distinct wear patterns, suggesting different uses. Whilst the larger flat surfaces and the side edges show evidence of polish, suggesting use as a whetstone, short edges and corners show evidence of abrasion by percussion, suggesting use as a hammerstone. The corners show damage consistent with having been used to crush some material, while larger missing flakes from the corners suggest a far more vigorous battering or hammering action. In places these crushing and battering marks had been partly worn flat by it's re-use as a whetstone. Therefore, the stone appears to have been a multi-purpose tool, used as a sharpening implement tool and also a crushing implement.
It is possible that the whetstone was used to crush up the ores found on site. However, microscopic inspection of the abraded surfaces of the whetstone revealed no evidence of its use in ore or slag crushing for example in embedded fragments of chalcopyrite or of malachite (Jenkins pers. comm.). Any fragments of ore or slags, though, may have already corroded. It is, therefore, unclear if this stone was involved in any prehistoric metalworking on the site and was re-deposited in the Medieval/post-medieval pit or is indeed a Medieval/post-medieval artefact.
I may have said this before, although I can't trace the message but, as someone who generally tries to look at things from less obvious perspectives, my suggestion is that what we have needs to be, mentally, turned over so that the curved surface is at the bottom. It then, and I'm allowing for a lot of plough damage by Nick and his predecessors, looks to me like a section shaped like the bottom of an arch with the curved section properly at the bottom. It might then be the top of a window opening or something similar.
Smooth surfaces with various scratch marks. Especially as it is in the vicinity of the hammer scale area.
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