3.5 Sites with inaccurate location

Documentation about the sites does not have a consistent degree of accuracy. Some literature only mentions the parish or hamlet where the finds come from. In museums and depots there is sometime little documentation available on the finds as well. The exact find location of such items is therefore often untraceable. We did include these sites in our data files, but estimated or rounded off the co-ordinates. In this we distinguished between so-called 'church' sites, where only the parish is known (from Venray, from Merselo) and so-called 'field' sites, where a local toponym is known (from the Boddenbroek, on the Meerlo heath). In the first instance the site was allocated the arbitrary co-ordinates of the largest church in the town or village, in the second situation those of the centre of the area known by that toponym.

For a site-typological analysis the lack of exact co-ordinates is of some influence. The artefact composition of all 'church' sites is too uncertain. Various find reports on the same site cannot be combined. After all, we do not know whether one or several sites in this parish are involved, making it necessary to record each find report separately. The 'field' sites offer less problems in this respect, because there is often more clarity about whether finds belong together. Although there is a chance that finds have been combined or recorded as separate sites erroneously, we feel the 'field' sites are suitable for inclusion in the site typology. The exclusion of the church sites means that 192 sites remain for the site-typological analysis.