D16

The megalithic tomb at Balloo, known as D16, belongs to the Neolithic western group of the Funnel Beaker culture. It lies at Balloo, a district of Aa en Hunze in the Dutch province of Drenthe, and carries the van Giffen number D16. It stands north-west of the village in a meadow on the east side of a field track. Several other tombs are nearby: the two tombs near Rolde (D17 and D18) lie 2.3 km east-southeast, and the tomb at Loon (D15) lies 2.5 km to the north.

This is a fairly large passage grave oriented east-north-east to west-south-west. Only slight remains of the stone surround survive, one stone in the north and one in the north-east. The burial chamber is 15.3 m long and about 3.9 m wide, with nine wall stones on the northern long side, ten on the southern, one end stone at each narrow side and nine capstones. The top of capstone number 3 carries three cup marks in a row, and capstone number 6 has seven cup marks forming an oval. In the middle of the southern long side is a passage made of two wall stones and one capstone.

Only small remains were recovered: 42.1 g of cremated bone, belonging to two individuals whose age at death and sex could no longer be determined. A small amount of burnt animal bone, only 0.9 g, was also found, and it could not be decided whether it came from tools or food offerings.

The tomb is first mentioned on French maps made in 1811–13. Leonhardt Johannes Friedrich Janssen of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden visited it in 1847 and published the first overview of Dutch tombs the following year. Willem Pleyte had the tombs photographed in 1874, and Conrad Leemans travelled to Drenthe in 1877. In 1878 William Collings Lukis and Henry Dryden drew very exact plans of 40 tombs. Willem Johannes de Wilde documented the tombs between 1904 and 1906, though his notes on Balloo are lost, and Albert Egges van Giffen recorded it in 1918.

The tomb was restored in 1952 and 1954, and in 1978 all the capstones were set back onto the wall stones. It has been a national monument (Rijksmonument) since 1993, and in 2017 it was recorded by photogrammetry in a 3D atlas of the surviving Dutch tombs. Such tombs, the hunebedden, were built between 3470 and 3250 BCE and used until about 2760 BCE.

D16 is a dolmen in Aa en Hunze, Germany. Wikidata describes it as: dolmen in the Netherlands. A typological estimate: 3500 BCE to 2800 BCE. No English Wikipedia article exists for it; the full text below is the German article "Großsteingrab Balloo", shown in the original language.