D54

Havelte 2, also called Havelteberg and carrying the Van Giffen number D54, is a megalithic tomb of the Neolithic western group of the Funnel Beaker culture. It lies near Havelte, a district of Westerveld in the province of Drenthe in the Netherlands, north of the village on the Hunebeddenweg. About 150 m to the west is its neighbour, Havelte 1, numbered D53. The catalogue dates it by typological estimate to between 3500 and 2800 BCE.

The monument is a passage grave aligned east-south-east to west-north-west. No stone surround could be identified. The burial chamber is 12.7 m long and 3.3 m wide, with seven pairs of wall stones along the long sides. Of the two end stones, the eastern one is missing, and so is the easternmost of the seven original capstones. The six surviving capstones all rest on the wall stones. The entrance to the chamber lies between the fourth and fifth wall stones of the southern long side, counted from the west, and in front of it was a passage that probably had two wall stones, of which only the western one survives.

The grave was first mentioned in 1732 by Andries Schoemaker, and in the same year Cornelis Pronk made a drawing of it. In 1847 Leonhardt Johannes Friedrich Janssen visited most of the surviving megalithic tombs of the Netherlands, including this one, and published the first overview with building descriptions and schematic plans in the following year. In 1874 Willem Pleyte travelled through Drenthe with the photographer Jan Goedeljee and had all the tombs systematically photographed for the first time, later making lithographs from the photographs. In 1877 Conrad Leemans made his own journey, though his report stayed unpublished.

Between 1904 and 1906 the physician and amateur archaeologist Willem Johannes de Wilde documented all the surviving tombs in the Netherlands with plans, photographs and building descriptions, but his notes on this tomb have been lost. Albert Egges van Giffen recorded it in 1918 for his atlas of Dutch megalithic tombs. Restorations were carried out in 1955, 1966 and 1995. No archaeological excavation has taken place so far.

Since 1997 the tomb has been a national monument. In 2017 it was recorded by photogrammetry in a 3D atlas, together with the other surviving megalithic tombs of the Netherlands, in a project of the province of Drenthe and the University of Groningen carried out by the Gratama foundation.

In the Netherlands, such tombs are called hunebedden. They were built by the western group of the Funnel Beaker culture and used until about 2760 BCE. Of an estimated 100 original tombs, 54 are preserved, 52 of them in Drenthe and two in Groningen.

D54 is a dolmen in Westerveld, 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 Havelte 2", shown in the original language.