Natural Science in Archaeology

52 3 Exploitation of Mineral and Rock Raw Materials
Fig. 3.1 Granite grinder,
Mine Dunquash, Egyptian
Eastern Desert
Granites were used as building or monumental stone in nearly every country
where good outcrops occurred. Granite columns are quite common in buildings
of Roman Spain. Although many local granites were quarried for buildings, many
granite building stones were imported from a number of other Mediterranean
region sources. Williams-Thorpe and Potts (2002) studied 152 granite columns
from Spain to determine their geologic provenance. Twenty-five columns were
attributed to sources in western Turkey and the Italian Islands Elba/Giglio and
Sardinia.
The granites of Aberdeen are the most famous of all building stones of Scotland.
The Shap granite of Cumbria, England, with pink and white feldspar phenocrysts,
was sought after as finishing stone. Finland is well known for the rapakivi granite–
a hornblende-biotite granite that has a texture in which large crystals of potassium
feldspar are rimmed by a sodic plagioclase feldspar in a finer-grained matrix.
Rapakivi is Finnish for “crumbly rock”, a name given to this rock because when
exposed to the atmosphere it crumbles into smaller pieces. Rapakivi granite is the
material used in the stone churches in the Middle Ages in Åland in the Gulf of
Bothnia between Sweden and Finland.
In India, granites were commonly used for the lower stories of Hindu temples
and in cave temples. In Neolithic South India granites formed a significant percentage
of querns and grindstones (Brumm et al. 2007).
In South America the famous Inca high mountain fortress at Machu Pichu was
constructed largely of granite. In Italy the “Granito del foro” of architectural historians
is a distinctive granodiorite (see Table 3.1) used in important monuments
in ancient Rome. It was quarried from the famous Mons Claudianus deposits in
the Egyptian Eastern Desert (Peacock et al. 1994). Many other granodiorites and