The ‘Stonehenge of the Netherlands’, a 4,000-year-old burial site the size of four football pitches, has just been discovered by Dutch archaeologists

Archaeologists in the central Dutch town of Tiel have discovered a 4,000-year-old shrine the size of four football pitches dubbed “the Stonehenge of the Netherlands”. The results of the search were made public Wednesday on the city’s Facebook page.

The site included several burial mounds, the largest of which was over 65 feet in diameter and also served as a kind of solar calendar. It contained the remains of about 60 men, women and children, according to the Guardian. The site has been used for burials for more than 800 years, according to archaeologists.

A shallow moat with several passages surrounds the larger mound, and on days including the summer and winter solstice, the sun shone directly through these passages.

Courtesy of the City of Tiel, via Facebook.

“This hill is reminiscent of Stonehenge, the mysterious prehistoric monument well known in Britain, where this phenomenon also occurs,” reported NOS, the national broadcasting service.

Valuable items such as a bronze spearhead, as well as human skulls and animal skeletons, have been found along the passageways of the site, and a glass bead has been discovered in the oldest part of the burial field . The city claims it is the oldest glass bead found in the Netherlands and originated in Mesopotamia.

“This pearl traveled a distance of about 5,000 kilometers four millennia ago,” said the project’s lead researcher, Cristian van der Linde of BAAC, a private Dutch company involved in aarchaeology, architectural and cultural history.

“The glass was not made here, so the pearl must have been a spectacular object because for people at the time it was an unknown material,” Stijn Arnoldussen, a professor at the University of Groningen, told NOS.

Courtesy of the City of Tiel, via Facebook.

Excavations in Tiel began in an industrial park in 2017, according to municipal archaeologist Ilse Schuuring. The city, which has a population of about 42,000, lies about 30 miles southeast of Utrecht.

Some of the finds from the site will go to the Flipje & Streekmuseum in Tiel and others to the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, Alderman Frank Groen said on Facebook. A scientific article will be published in the fall.

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