What should have been an ‘ordinary’ school day turned out to be the day of his life for Ryszard Rubisz from Lelystad. During a school trip to the Hunebed Center in Borger, he took a look at a metre-high boulder hump and here he made a major archaeological find. The archeology student found a thousands-year-old axe!
Rubisz and his class received a tour from Fred van den Beems, archaeologist and volunteer at the Hunebed Center. “I had told you that special stones could be found in the boulder hump, but we have never removed more than a flint or a grinding stone ourselves. So this was very special,” says Van den Beems.
“They flew towards it like ants,” says Van den Beems, laughing. You only have to tell archeology students once where ancient objects could be found, and then they can’t be removed from there, the archaeologist explains. “The funny thing is that this ax was found after 5 minutes. It was mainly noticeable because of its strange shape, so we soon realized that it was an ax.”
After briefly studying the elongated stone, the students and the archaeologist discovered that this is not just any axe. “There is something strange about this axe. The stone has been worked on two sides, which means that it probably had a function in two eras. In the Stone Age it functioned as an axe, but in the Middle Ages as a grinding stone,” says Van den Beems
The (future) archaeologists noticed this because one side of the stone is flat and the other side has a small curve. Van den Beems: “If you find grinding stones, they usually come from the Middle Ages or later. You hardly find these types of grinding stones from prehistory.”
The archaeologist’s theory is that people in the Middle Ages liked the ax to sharpen a knife. “It could also be that prehistoric man did this, but of course we don’t know that. We cannot look into the past,” says Van den Beems. To find out, the ax is studied by an archaeologist who specializes in objects more than 4,000 years old.
The metre-high boulder bump has been on the grounds of the Hunebed Center for three years. “A local farmer once brought all these stones here. At first the hump was a few meters higher, but when children play on it they often take a stone home with them,” says the Hunebed Center volunteer.
Van den Beems can laugh at the idea that there might be children at home who have made a beautiful archaeological find here. “We’ll never find out. We don’t know, but they certainly don’t,” he says with a laugh.
There is a good chance that the lump is still full of hidden gems. “Everyone is welcome to come and do some searching here.”