3.6 The importance of culturally clean sites

At first sight, the figure of 192 datable sites whose exact location is known appears to be reasonably large. There is, however, an even more important limiting factor for the site-typological analysis. It is essential to have 'culturally clean' sites. We defined clean sites as those where the number of guide artefacts from a single archaeological phase makes up at least 90% of all guide artefacts. Therefore a contamination of, at most, 10% of other guide artefacts on a site is acceptable. A LBK site with 11% guide artefacts from the early amd middle Mesolithic or a Michelsberg site with 25% guide artefacts from the Beaker phase are both mixed sites. A late Mesolithic site with 15 trapezia and 1 macrolithic artefact (Michelsberg guide artefact) is, however, by the definition we have selected, a culturally clean site (6% contamination).

Only the sites that may be considered culturally clean can be used for a site-typological analysis. Only then may the non-guide artefacts, such as scrapers and cores, be considered part of the habitation in that phase. Guide and non-guide artefacts together accurately represent the artefact composition.

In the south-east of the Netherlands, a great many sites turn out to be mixed. The stable geological terrain (2.6) during the Holocene is of course an important explanation for this. In all there are only 64 culturally clean sites divided by period in the core region of Venray. All other sites (82%) are excluded from the site-typological analysis for one or more reasons. The core region of Venray is archaeologically very rich. In spite of this the amount of useful data turn out to be of very limited as a result of post-depositional, administrative and research factors. Of the 356 sites, only 64 can be used to obtain an insight into the different types of settlement. For some phases there are even too few data and in the end only three periods remain: late Mesolithic, Michelsberg phase and Beaker period.