2008
Inspiration
Art and nature walk Arti Archaeology
Prehistory
About 4000 BC the hunters that visited Drenthe before, changed their culture and lifestyle radically. They learned to grow wheat, to domesticate cattle and to build farmhouses. They settled here as the first farmers in the region. Archaeologists call this period the Neolithics or New Stone Age. This did not happen only here but also in the south of Sweden, in Denmark and the northwest of Germany. These farmers cut the woods with stone axes and cultivated the arable land. About 3450 BC they started building huge stone graves using the big boulders that were scattered all over the place. They also made all sorts of earthenware, many of them in the form of a funnel. Because of that archaeologists say this people belong to The Funnel Beaker Culture.
The Funnel Beaker Culture
Called TRB for the abbreviation of its German name (Tricherrandbecher), is a subset of the Beaker culture (like Bell Beaker). They were the first farmers of much of Northern Europe, and as such belong to the Early Neolithic. The Funnel Beaker artifact type (a handleless drinking vessel shaped like a funnel) shows up with the earliest agriculture in northern Europe, at sites like Sarup, Denmark, beween 4000 and 2800 years ago. Sites are found throughout northern Europe to the Ukraine and Austria.
Celtic fields
Celtic fields are a popular name for the traces of early agricultural.They are sometimes preserved in areas were industrial farming has not been adopted and can date from any time between the Early (c. 1800 BC) until the early mediaeval period.They are characterised by their proximity to other ancient features such as enclosures, hollow ways and farmsteads and are divided into a patchwork quilt of square plots rarely more that 2,000 m² in area although larger examples are known. Their small size implies that each was cultivated by one individual of family.
