D43

The megalithic tomb of Emmen-Schimmeres, catalogued as D43, was built by the western group of the Neolithic Funnel Beaker culture in Emmen, in the Dutch province of Drenthe. With a total length of 40,3 m it is the largest megalithic tomb in the Netherlands and also the only one in the country that contains two burial chambers. D43 is its Van Giffen number. It stands on a green space at the western edge of Emmen, with many other tombs nearby, among them Emmen-Noord (D41) 750 m to the north and Emmerdennen (D45) 1,4 km to the east.

The monument has a long bed, oriented north-north-east to west-south-west, which contains two passage graves. The bed has a slightly trapezoid outline with rounded narrow ends. It is 40,3 m long and 7 m wide in the north and 5 m wide in the south. It is enclosed by 54 stones whose flat sides face outwards, and the gaps between them were originally filled with drystone walling, which was reconstructed after the investigation of 1960. The mound fill was largely removed without proper documentation during a restoration in 1869.

The northern chamber is 4,6 m long, 3 m wide and about 1,5 m high, with three pairs of wall stones, an end stone at each short side and three capstones. Its entrance passage is paved with small stones. The southern chamber is larger, 8,1 m long and 2,9 m wide, with five pairs of wall stones; of its original five capstones, two survive. Three pits were found, two by Holwerda and a third by van Giffen in 1960. Their function is unclear for lack of meaningful finds.

The tomb appears on a map made between 1788 and 1792. Visitors and scholars documented it through the nineteenth century, including a survey in 1878 that produced very precise plans of 40 megalithic tombs. Jan Hendrik Holwerda excavated it in 1913, and Albert Egges van Giffen excavated it again in 1960, after which it was restored; a further restoration followed in 1997. It has been a national monument (Rijksmonument) since 1983.

The chambers held comparatively few finds, mainly pottery sherds, including large bulging vessels, cylindrical vessels, funnel beakers, a collared flask and a spouted bowl. There were also flint fragments, an unfinished axe, a small narrow chisel and an amulet made from a pierced fossil. Holwerda's finds are now in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden. Tombs of this kind in the Netherlands are called hunebedden, and of an estimated 100 original tombs, 54 are preserved, 52 of them in Drenthe.

D43 is a dolmen in Emmen, 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 Emmen-Schimmeres", shown in the original language.