Antiquity Reviews: Scarre September 2011

Book Review

JAN ALBERT BAKKER. Megalithic research in the Netherlands, 1547–1911: from 'Giant's beds' and 'Pillars of Hercules' to accurate investigations. viii+318 pages, 67 illustrations. 2010. Leiden: Sidestone; 978-90-8890-034-1 paperback £26

Review by Chris Scarre
Department of Archaeology, Durham University, UK
(Email: chris.scarre@durham.ac.uk)

In June 1685 Titia Brongersma (known as 'Sappho, the tenth muse') and her cousin undertook the first excavation of a Dutch megalithic tomb. The site in question, now labelled D27-Borger, is one of the 53 extant monuments commonly known as hunebeds, which form part of a much broader megalithic tomb tradition extending eastwards across northern Germany and southern Scandinavia. What might today be reported in an academic monograph or scholarly journal became instead the subject of a series of poems exchanged between Titia Brongersma and her medical friend Ludoph Smids. True to poetic fashion, Brongersma rejected the idea that the structure had been a functional burial place or a memorial to the Huns, preferring it as a marble temple to the goddess Nature, to be venerated by the laying of a wreath of flowers and oak leaves (Bakker 2010: 54).

Jan Albert Bakker is well known as the leading authority on the Dutch hunebeds. In this latest volume he turns his attention from the tombs and their contents (The TRB West Group, 1979; The Dutch Hunebedden, 1992) to the story of their discovery and research.

That story begins in 1547 with Anthonius Schonhovius Batavus who suggested that the Pillars of Hercules in Tacitus' Germania were to be identified with a heap of large stones near Rolde in Drenthe in north-eastern Holland. A century later, Johan Picardt argued that the Drenthe tombs were burial places for giants, an opinion repeated by Smids in 1711. It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that the race of giants was finally knocked on the head. That same century saw the first detailed work on Dutch megalithic tombs, notably by Joannes van Lier who excavated D13-Eext in 1756. The growing interest in the tombs was marked by the passing of a law for their protection in 1754, but that proved of limited impact, especially since many of them remained in private hands until 1870. Their adoption by the state perversely brought further destruction as mounds were systematically stripped away following the mistaken belief that all genuine hunebeds had been free-standing megalithic structures.

A number of key themes within the history of research emerge from the rich detail provided by Bakker's account. One such is the sense of relative isolation. The northern province of Drenthe, where the great majority of the tombs were located, lay far from the centres of power and overseas commerce in Amsterdam and The Hague. We are nonetheless given occasional glimpses of the international cultural and political scene in which the Netherlands were engaged through references to the Dutch Enlightenment and to the French occupation of 1795 to 1813. Much of the early research on the hunebeds was, however, carried out by local clergymen or administrators with only limited engagement in wider scholarly networks. Bakker comments that it was only in the 1870s that Drenthe began to lose its independence. He also remarks that hunebeds never became part of a nationalist origins myth, perhaps because they were restricted to this relatively isolated corner of the Netherlands (p. 188).

Dutch megalithic research nevertheless paralleled or prefigured contemporary developments in France and Denmark in many respects. Thus the 1685 excavation at D27-Borger echoes the first French excavation that same year at Cocherel in Normandy, and Van Lier's development of a Two-Age system (stone followed by iron) in 1760 anticipates by some decades the birth of Thomsen's Three-Age system in Copenhagen. By the 1870s, realistic ages of 2000 BC or 3000 BC were being proposed for the hunebeds, but some authorities, such as Gratama, persisted in advocating a much younger origin. The long and contentious path towards a reliable chronology recalls debates in Britain, France and Denmark at around the same period, illustrated for example by divergent opinions expressed at the Congrès Préhistorique in Paris in 1867.

Bakker's account brings to life a fascinating gallery of relatively unknown antiquaries and scholars and is a valuable addition to the growing literature on the history of European archaeology. It provides a springboard for further work contextualising these early researchers within the broader world of political, social and intellectual changes affecting the Netherlands and its neighbours during these centuries. Richly documented, with copious quotations and illustrations (which have reproduced relatively well despite the coarseness of the paper), it will undoubtedly be the leading text on the subject for many years to come. Above all, it illustrates the quirky and irregular path towards archaeological knowledge and understanding, one that was marked by many false starts and detours, and by fieldwork of variable quality, and ultimately achieved a true coming of age only within the last hundred years.