Outer zone
In the Netherlands adzes have been found all along the river Meuse as far north as Nijmegen (Bakels 1987, 78). The northernmost are two (not fully reliable) adzes from the Veluwe district, c. 150 km from the loess (Schut 1991, 59). No LBK adzes are known from the well-documented province of Drenthe farther north (Beuker et al. 1992).[7] In Belgium only a single specimen has been reported at a comparable distance (75 km), found in the 19th century during construction work at Antwerp-Fort St. Marie (Jadin & Hauzeur 2003, 88-89, locus 6).
One adze provides a little more information. A sand dredging location near the village of Gassel yielded a flat adze and some Early Neolithic sherds (so-called Begleitkeramik) among tens of thousands of pieces of flint, ranging in age from Early Mesolithic through to Late Neolithic (Brounen & De Jong 1988; Verhart 2000, 33). Artefacts considered characteristic for LBK are, however, completely absent and it must be questioned whether adze and sherds relate to a single activity, as is suggested.
The only other LBK artefacts in this outer zone are some 30 flint arrow-heads, all isolated surface finds, in distribution overlapping with the adzes (De Graaf 1987; Louwe Kooijmans 1993b, fig. 11). An exceptional find is a typical LBK arrow-head of Rijckholt type flint excavated from the oldest level of Hardinxveld-Giessendam Polderweg, dated to 5500-5300 cal. BC. The contact must have occurred at an extremely early moment in time, since this arrow-head found its way to the west almost immediately after LBK colonists had settled in South-Limburg in 5300 cal. BC.