D37

D37 is a dolmen in the Dutch province of Drenthe, near the village of Valthe. Together with D36, it forms the pair known as De Valther Tweeling, the Valthe Twins. Both lie at the edge of the Ooster esch, close to the Kampervenen marsh, and can be reached from the Hoofdstraat in Valthe along a sandy track. The monument is attributed to the Funnel Beaker culture and is dated by typological estimate to about 3500–2800 BCE. D37 is 11.4 metres long and 3.7 metres wide, with its entrance on the south side.

D37 is less well preserved than its twin. Its stones lie scattered and unevenly, and three capstones are missing. Two capstones remain, but both lie on the ground; most of the supporting stones are still in place. The two dolmens lie in line with one another and are 8.2 metres apart. It is likely that they were once covered by a single burial mound, and a prehistoric route ran close past D37. Both monuments are owned by the province of Drenthe, which bought them from the Valthe farmers’ common land in 1871.

The dolmens were first recorded on the Hottingerkaart map of 1788–1792 and were described by Nicolaas Westendorp in 1822, who noted that both had been dug into. When Van Giffen examined D37, it was in a badly damaged condition: three capstones lay in the burial chamber and others were missing. The chamber’s contents have never been investigated, and a small restoration took place in 1952. Archaeological work began in 2012 in a protected area next to the monument, after accidental digging in 2011 created the opportunity. Excavations funded by the Dienst Landelijk Gebied and carried out by the Groninger Instituut voor Archeologie with students and volunteers recovered 133 Neolithic pottery sherds decorated with Funnel Beaker motifs, along with two baking plates. Fragments of burnt flint axes lay in the entrance space, and traces of buildings from the Funnel Beaker period and the Iron Age were found.

Concern in nineteenth-century England about restoration in the Netherlands led the director of the Society of Antiquaries in London to ask William Collings Lukis and Sir Henry Dryden to record the condition of the dolmens. They visited Drenthe in July 1878, surveyed forty dolmens on the Hondsrug, and took measurements, descriptions and watercolours. Their report was never printed, but their material is held by the Society of Antiquaries, the Guernsey Museum & Art Gallery and the Drents Museum, with copies at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Drenthe archaeologist Wijnand van der Sanden published the work in 2015 with an extensive introduction, judging it to be of high quality, and the Drents Museum held an exhibition on it that year. D37 appears on Plan XXVIII. On their visit, Lukis and Dryden saw that it still had three capstones, one of them broken, out of an original six, with twelve supporting stones and remains of a burial mound visible.

D37 is a dolmen in Borger-Odoorn, 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 Dutch article "D37 (hunebed)", shown in the original language.