The hunebed world

When people first started domesticating animals and growing crops, it brought about quite a few changes. The need for a nomadic life decreased. Instead, more and more people built houses and settled there permanently. In some areas, the transition to this different way of life took place swiftly, but not in the north of Europe. There it took thousands of years for the hunter-gatherers to completely adopt this area-based farming lifestyle. 

Hunebed builders had cattle and worked the land, but still had one foot in hunter-gatherer life. Yet they built the gigantic stone structures we call ‘hunebeds’: large megalithic tombs, which are found from the north of the Netherlands to deep into Sweden, Poland and Ukraine. There are of course distinct differences within this ’world of the hunebed builders’. But people unavoidably exchange things and ideas and influence each other by sharing stories and traditions. That’s what links them. Objects that were commonly exchanged (1) and sacrificed (2, 3) were axes.