Assen, Schoonloo, Rolde

In the Middle Stone Age, around 4400 BC, a people we now call the Funnel Beaker people lived in Drenthe. We named this people after the shape of the most common earthenware cup found in their tombs. They made these tombs under monuments of heavy boulders: the dolmens.

The boulders (megaliths), which sometimes weigh up to 40 tonnes, were brought to our country by huge glaciers during the Ice Age, about 150,000 years ago. Originally, they came from Finland and Sweden. The largest boulders were made into the frame, the flatter stones formed the roof and keystones were placed at the ends. How the people of the Funnel Beaker people managed to get the stones off the ground cannot be determined with certainty. At the Hunebed Centre in Borger, you can see that with a ramp of earth, and tree trunks to roll over, this must have been possible.

In the Middle Ages, church leaders saw the hunebeds as works of the devil and obstacles from a pagan past. Consequently, they did not spare the megalithic tombs. Often the dolmens were taken apart and the stones used as foundations for newly built churches. In later centuries, several of the used stones were found and sometimes even replaced.

In the Netherlands, 54 hunebeds can still be found in various states of being. None is complete any more. In Groningen you will find G1 and G2 and in Drenthe D1 to D54. D33 has been demolished and after investigation, D48 turned out not to be a hunebed after all. The mapping of these hunebeds was done in the early 20th century by Professor Doctor Albert van Giffen (1884-1973), commissioned by the Dutch government. Van Giffen was able to extensively survey the extant hunebeds and their burial vaults and published his report in 1925. Apart from the funnel cups, bottles, bowls and buckets were also found in the tombs. These finds have given us many insights into how people lived and dealt with the dead at that time.

The objects and human remains found in the burial vaults under the hunebeds, by different researchers, in different periods, are scattered around various museums. Many of the objects found by Professor Van Giffen are included in the collection of the Drents Museum in Assen. In the years between 1960 and 1970, researcher Dr Jan Albert Bakker of the University of Amsterdam particularly investigated the contents of several of the burial chambers and the artefacts (objects) found there. These objects were loaned by the University of Amsterdam to the Hunebedcentrum in Borger. English researchers William Lukis and Henry Dryden conducted research in 1878, on their own initiative. They did not trust the approach of the Governor in charge, Gregory of Drenthe, in his research and restoration of hunebeds, and travelled to the Netherlands. Unfortunately, the finds they made they took with them to England and are on display at the British Museum in London.

There were, over the centuries, more researchers with a keen interest in the dolmens. The finds of the first researchers were often not recovered. As with Johannes van Lier who carried out the first documented research, around 1756, probably on his own initiative. And Titia Brongersma, a poet and amateur archaeologist, who in 1685, also on her own intitiative, investigated a piece of the burial vault of D27. Danish archaeologist Erik Petersen was commissioned by the Nationalmuseet in Denmark to investigate the building techniques and cultural context in 1987. Consequently, no soil finds were made or taken away during his research. This was also no longer allowed at that time.

A large number of hunebeds were restored by Albert van Giffen as a result of the research. With varying degrees of success, by the way; some say that in some cases Professor Van Giffen relied too little on the facts and too much on his own guesswork. Restoring hunebeds has always been controversial. The original situtation cannot usually be determined with certainty, as evidenced by the many different research findings. However, scholars have agreed on one thing. Digging out the burial vaults is too great an attack on the dolmens, and is unlikely to lead to many more new insights, so it will not happen again.


This Premium cycle route was compiled by our editor: Désirée van Uffelen.