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4. Interpreting 'Productive Sites'

Previous sections have examined the national distribution of portable antiquities of all periods (Section 2) and then compared it against the distribution of finds of the early medieval period (Section 3), drawing conclusions about settlement patterns and regional differences in the nature of activity across early medieval England. Against this background it is now time to examine the specific class of early medieval sites known as 'productive sites', which are known only for their concentrations of early medieval metalwork.

Section 4.1 will introduce the topic, outlining previous research and defining what is meant by the term 'productive site'. Section 4.2 will then describe the second major phase of data collection undertaken by the VASLE project, leading to the production of the 'Sites Dataset'. Detailed finds information was collected for a sample of 69 sites, including some excavated sites as control samples, as well as a large number of sites known only from metal-detector finds. Although the precise location of these sites is often unknown (and in other cases must be protected for reasons of site security) care was taken to ensure that the finds did originate from the same focus of activity. For the purposes of the analyses described and performed in Section 4.3 it is sufficient to identify a site to a region so that the artefact and coinage fingerprints can be set against the overall fingerprint for that region. Section 4.3 discusses the patterns that emerged from the site-level fingerprints, and then Section 4.4 provides a site by site listing and access to the fingerprint charts for each of the 69 sites. Finally, Section 4.5 draws some overall conclusions about the interpretation of 'productive sites'.


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