The TimeSpots at the Hunebedcentrum
Each TimeSpot is a real place at the Hunebedcentrum and out in the Drenthe landscape where you can stand and see the past restored in full, 360 degrees around you. Travel to a spot to unlock it, then look around the scene at your own pace. The map shows every TimeSpot, and new ones are added as the project grows.
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The ritual at Hunebed D27.
Stand at the great tomb as the community gathers in homage, the seasons turning around them. -
Daily life in the village.
Life around the farmhouse, with cooking fires, flint and leather work, weaving, pottery and children at play -
Building Hunebed D26.
Witness a hunebed under construction, its giant stones hauled, raised and set by hand. -
The harvest feast.
A rich autumn celebration of food, drink, music and shared labour, with thanks given to the ancestors. -
The harvest.
The whole village out in the fields, gathering the wheat and processing the year's crops. -
Sowing the fields.
A spring scene of tilling and sowing, with even the smallest children helping to keep the birds away. -
Gathering, hunting and fishing.
At the edge of their lands by the river, the people forage, fish and hunt, living broadly off the land. -
Inside the house in winter.
The whole family gathered close by the fire, working, cooking and sharing stories through the cold.
How to use TimeLens
Step 1: Travel to a TimeSpot
Make your way to one of the historic locations shown on the map. Once you arrive, it automatically unlocks the TimeSpot for you.
Step 2: Look around
Hold up your phone and take in the scene in every direction. A 360-degrees historic reconstruction of the city full of life.
Step 3: Collect rewards
For each location you discover, you receive a badge and some TimeCoins as a reward. Discovering combinations of TimeSpots even gives you special awards.
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Want to help us create more of these reconstructions?
Every reconstruction takes months of research and craft. A small amount each month helps us build more of them, and brings you along for the journey, with early previews, behind the scenes insights, and a say in which places we bring back next. You can even have your name featured in the app, or appear as a figure in a future scene.
Based on historic research
The experts behind the prehistoric reconstructions
Every Hunebedcentrum TimeSpot is created in collaboration with the Hunebedcentrum in Borger, the national centre for hunebed research, so each scene rests on solid archaeology rather than guesswork. Their decades of work on the hunebed builders and the Funnel Beaker culture are the foundation of what you see.
Experience the past where it once happened
The story behind our reconstructions
Across Drenthe stand dozens of hunebeds, giant stone tombs older than the pyramids of Egypt. But the people who raised them, their farms, their fields and their rituals, vanished thousands of years ago. Standing before the bare boulders today, it takes real imagination to picture the world that built them.
TimeLens brings that world back. Working from careful archaeology, we rebuild the life of the hunebed builders and set it back where it happened. Stand at the Hunebedcentrum or beside a real hunebed, raise your phone, and see their village, their harvest and the raising of a tomb restored in every direction around you.
What makes the hunebeds special is their age and their mystery. These are the oldest monuments in the Netherlands, raised more than five thousand years ago, and so much about the people who built them survives only in fragments. TimeLens fills in the living world around the stones, the first farmers of the north brought back to life.
