De grafheuvel van de bronstijdkrijger van Drouwen: onderzoeksgeschiedenis, hergebruik in de Vroege Middeleeuwen en regionale funeraire context

Abstract

In 1927, A.E. van Giffen excavated a largely levelled burial mound near the village of Drouwen in the Dutch province of Drenthe. A few years later, Van Giffen published a summary report on the excavation, in which he concentrated on the lavish inventory of the central Sögel warrior burial. In 1985-1989, J.N. Lanting carried out further research at the site of the mound and revealed a large number of soil features from the Bronze Age and early Middle Ages. This second excavation has never been published before. The present article discusses both excavations. After an evaluation of all the excavation data the author zooms in on the warrior: what was his cultural context, and how can we interpret his social status in the region? The article concludes with an analysis of the spatial pattern of which this burial mound is a part. To do so, the author looks at all the prehistoric and protohistoric burial monuments in the area between the villages of Drouwen and Borger.
Van Giffen’s profile drawings of the mound section he investigated suggest two construction phases. The oldest structure, a central mound of grey sand (c. 8 m across by c. 0.80 m high), was raised over the remains of a pyre. This first mound probably dates to the Early or early Middle Bronze Age. In the 16th century BC the warrior grave was dug into this mound; posts around the grave suggest the presence of a mortuary house or fence. The mound that was associated with this grave was c. 1.60 m high, possibly elongated (26 by 15 m or less) and surrounded by an oval ditch up to 1.6 m wide, with to the north a c. 3.40-m-wide opening. Whether there were any secondary burials is unknown.
In the early Middle Ages, when the surrounding ditch had long since been filled in, the mound and its immediate vicinity became the location of a cemetery with graves arranged in rows (rijengrafveld). Only a small section of this cemetery was excavated (61 graves) so that the full period it was used is uncertain. Most graves were oriented east-west. Of the investigated graves, the majority were fully excavated, and several contained traces of a coffin. The buried individuals were mostly adults. Many did not produce any grave goods, and those items that were found were - in Van Giffen’s words - ‘armelijk’, rather poor. They are mostly iron knives and ‘prikkels’ (‘goads’, iron points, of unknown function, originally attached to a rod), bronze needle cases, keys, and one brooch. Of particular interest are three strings of beads and one isolated bead. To the extent they can be dated, all grave goods are comparatively late and could well be 8th and 9th-century, indicating that the cemetery ended at some point in the 9th century. The only human remains come from a small sub-recent pit close to Grave 29 (GrM-28439: 1244 ± 21 BP, i.e. 680-876 cal AD (2σ)).
It is highly unlikely that the ‘Drouwen Warrior’ was anything more than a ‘big man’ whose network extended into northern Germany and possibly even Scandinavia. Whether he actually was a warrior in life is still an open question. When he was buried, at some point in the 16th century BC, several (very) ancient burial monuments already existed nearby. The mound of the warrior may have been part of an old linear alignment of these features. Why this particular mound was chosen in the early medieval period to situate a cemetery will probably always remain a mystery, although it is tempting to think that stories about the dead man buried there 2200 years earlier were still being told in the 7th or 8th century AD. That would tie in with the current archaeological narrative of the Bronze Age warrior as a person who strove after a heroic status after death, a form of immortality, created by the stories, passed on in each generation, of his martial, cosmopolitan and adventurous life.