Dubbed the ‘Stonehenge of the Netherlands’, Dutch archaeologists have uncovered a 4,000-year-old religious site with a burial mound that once served as a solar calendar. “What a spectacular archaeological discovery,” said the city of Tiel, which is about 50 kilometers south-east of Utrecht, on Facebook on Wednesday. It is the first time such a site has been discovered in the Netherlands.
The burial mound, found on an industrial site, is about 20 meters in diameter. It reportedly contained the remains of 60 people and had several passageways through which the sun shone on the longest and shortest days of the year. The aisles made it possible to use it as a solar calendar.
“People used this calendar to mark important moments such as festivals and harvest days,” the archaeologists said. Dutch broadcaster NOS reported that the mound is reminiscent of the Stonehenge prehistoric site in south-west England.
During the excavations that began in 2017, experts also discovered two other, smaller burial mounds. All three were therefore used as burial sites for around 800 years.
However, the archaeologists made another sensational find: they discovered a glass bead inside a tomb. An investigation has shown that this came from Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq. “Four millennia ago, this pearl covered a distance of around 5,000 kilometers,” said research leader Cristian van der Linde.
“Glass wasn’t made here,” said Stijn Arnoldussen, a professor at the University of Groningen. “The pearl must have been a spectacular object for people because it was an unknown material.” However, she probably did not get to the tomb directly from Mesopotamia – “things were already being exchanged at that time”.
