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What are hunebeds?

Hunebeds are prehistoric burial chambers, built around 5,000 years ago at the beginning of the New Stone Age (c 3,500 BC).

What does a hunebed look like?

Today the remains of hunebeds look like piles of large boulders in the landscape. Originally they consisted of a series of ‘doorways’: two enormous stones standing upright with a third resting across the top. Placed one behind the other, these doorways created a sort of tunnel with the burial chamber in the middle. This chamber was about 1.75 metres high, tall enough to stand up inside. The structure was then covered with a mound of earth. Each hunebed had an entrance in the long side and was sometimes surrounded by a ring of smaller stones. Today all of these earthen mounds have disappeared.

 Who built them?

They were built by the first people to settle as farmers in this part of the Netherlands. They came here around 4,400 BC and made their homes on the higher sandy ground along the Hondsrug above the surrounding swamps. Archaeologists call them the Funnel Beaker Culture because of the distinctive shape of the pottery found in the tombs.

Where did the stones come from?

The enormous boulders were brought here by the movement of glaciers during the last but one Ice Age about 150,000 years ago. The ice did not cover the whole of the Netherlands but only reached as far as a line south of Drenthe. That is why the stones – and therefore hunebeds – are only found in the north of the country. Most of the stones came from the region now known as Sweden and Finland in Scandinavia. The largest stones weigh around 40 tons.