Hunnebed Centrum
To explore past culinary practices I contacted Nadine Lemmers at the fantastic Hunnebed Centre in Borger.
She gave a quick tour of all the stuff they are working on. It is an innovative museum, with a great atmosphere. Outside are several reconstructions of prehistoric architecture some of the mayor farm-houses have only been finished in the autumn of 2014. The structures have an amazing smell and materiality. It really transports you back into time, much like I hope our culinary experiment at Villa Ockenburg will do. Nadine stressed the abundance of meat in the palaeolithic diet. Reindeer meat would be a great addition, but is harder to come by since it has a more protected status. Luckily I still have some dried reindeer meat from PixelAche in Finland! We quickly discussed prehistoric foods in the museum restaurant which actually features a mammoth. So I was in the right place!
We met Max who is setting up an ArcheoHotspot with his 3D printer. He gave me a printed ironeage barn he just finished. And we met Harry who works in a basement workshop about conserving bones and the huge collection of stones with feature scrachmarks and sand erosion and can sometimes be traced back to their place of origin.
Just behind the Centre is the monolithic structure known in Dutch as a Hennebed. It stretches out over some 15m. These things are the oldest remaining architecture in the country. It took some time to really get a feel for its age. And I wondered how they split the massive boulders to have a flat side that becomes the ceiling of the structure.
So below is a diorama that shows what the area could have looked like. The Netherlands were a very thinly populated area back then. A megalithic structure like this would be an immense gesture of human presence, which may be hard to fully appreciate in our overcrowded landscape today.