D49

Papeloze Kerk, catalogued as D49, is a restored megalithic tomb, known in Dutch as a hunebed, near Schoonoord in the Netherlands. It is also called De Papeloze Kerk. The name is disputed but is generally thought to mean priestless church, or popeless church, from the Dutch paap, meaning priest. It is sometimes said that anti-Catholic, or anti-popish, sermons were held here in the 16th century.

The monument was heavily damaged in the 1860s by people who used it as a quarry for building material. A. E. van Giffen excavated it in 1938 and again in 1958. In 1959 he chose to restore it as a demonstration model of a Dutch hunebed tomb. Some of the stones used came from elsewhere, including eleven stones taken from another hunebed, D33.

As restored, half of the tomb was covered in earth and its chamber was reconstructed with dry-stone walling. The other half was left in skeleton form, so that visitors can see both how such a tomb looked when complete and how its stones were arranged. Because of this reconstruction, what stands at Papeloze Kerk today is partly a modern reconstruction rather than wholly an original structure.

Monuments of this kind in the region belong to the tradition of the Funnel Beaker culture, which built the megalithic tombs of northern Germany and the Netherlands, in a style called Nordic megalith architecture. In the Netherlands the tombs, the hunebedden, were built between 3470 and 3250 BCE by the western group of that culture and used until about 2760 BCE. Of an estimated 100 original tombs, 54 are preserved, 52 of them in the province of Drenthe and two in Groningen.

After the Funnel Beaker culture ended, such sites were reused by the Single Grave and Bell Beaker cultures in the Early Bronze Age and, to a lesser extent, into the Middle Ages. For Papeloze Kerk itself, no construction date or burial finds are given, so its original age and use are not known from the available record beyond this regional background.

The meaning of the name is disputed but it is generally thought to mean "priestless church" (Dutch: paap = priest) or "popeless church". It is sometimes said that anti-Catholic (anti-"popish") sermons were held here in the 16th century.