Located in the northeast of the Netherlands, the province Drenthe is a sparsely populated rural area, its land being mainly used for agriculture. It has been populated by people since prehistory, the artifacts from the Wolstonian Stage (150.000 years ago) being among the oldest found in the Netherlands. In fact, it was one of the most densely populated areas of the Netherlands until the Bronze Age. Most tangible evidence of this are the dolmens (hunebedden) built in the middle of the Stone Age (in the Neolithic Era, 3400-2850 BC); 52 of the 54 dolmens in the Netherlands can be found in Drenthe, concentrated in the northeast of the province.
The largest dolmen is to be found in the Dolmen Centre in Borger where you can find out all about dolmens and the Funnelbeaker people who built them. They buried their dead in dolmens, built using enormous boulders that had been brought by the glaciers from Southern Scandinavia during the Ice Age. The stones formed the framework for the grave and the openings were filled using smaller stones, after which the whole structure was covered with sand and sods of earth. Only one of the dolmens has survived to the present day in its covered form - dolmen number D13 in Eext.
I'm not sure, but I believe that in the postcard is Hunebed D27, the biggest dolmen of the Netherlands with a length of 22.5m, 9 huge capstones, 26 sidestones, 2 endstones and a complete porch consisting of 5 passage-stones. Strange enough no artifacts have been found here. There are indications that in the 17th century a lot of digging took place in this grave and they left nothing behind. Besides this dolmen is the Dolmen Centre (Hunebedcentrum), a permanent exposition about everything that has anything to do with hunebeds and the so called Funnelbeaker Culture in the Netherlands.
About the stamp
The stamp is one of the two issued by Netherlands for Europa Stamps 2013, with the theme The postman van., about which I wrote here.
References
Drenthe - Wikipedia
Dolmens in Drenthe - Drenthe official website
sender: Juanne / Fee90 (postcrossing)
sent from Hilversum (North Holland / Netherlands), on 29.04.2014
No comments:
Post a Comment