At the time when the ocean shores were
mostly unpopulated, families had already
taken possession of the inland waters. The nomad hunters of the Old Stone Age
very often found their way barred by rivers large and small. They could halt upon the
banks, fishing and pursuing the aquatic birds, but they wanted to cross the water in
order to see what lay upon the other side. From Early Palaeolithic times onward,
therefore, pioneers used tree trunks or bundles of branches for crossing wetlands.
By the Neolithic period people had command
of cutting tools and of fire, and used
them to hollow out the trunks of trees. Thus was born the canoe, that almost
unsinkable vessel, ideal for river navigation and still used by millions in all the
continents. It extended the range of settlement sites, for the family who owns and
can paddle a canoe is able not only to go where he will upon most waterways but
also, in case of need, to make its domicile on the islands and shores of lakes and
rivers.
In 1853 the peasants owning fields alongside
the lakes of Switzerland
congratulated themselves upon an exceptionally dry winter; everywhere the low level
of the water made it possible to encroach upon the lakes and increase the area of
cultivated ground. Indeed an immemorial custom required them in such
circumstances to dam the dried-up inlets and fill them with mud taken from the lake.
In the spring of 1854 they set about their task, but in many places their work was
impeded by strange obstacles, clusters of stakes driven into the lake bottom and
forming a sort of palisade two or three hundred yards from the shore. The stakes
were stout and from six to a dozen feet in length. To remove them would have taken
time and required heavy toil. So they confined themselves to removing the mud
between the stakes, which they wisely left alone.
They went down with their buckets, cursing
the Romans for having stupidly
barricaded 'their' lake. At first no one noticed that the mud contained implements of
stone, wood and bone, and all were astonished when one of the workmen brought
back in his pail things that looked like ornaments of bronze. Knowing that school-
masters and museum officials were interested in Roman relics, the Swiss peasants
informed them. Thus it came about, in March and April 1854, that the schools and
municipal offices in the townships by the lakes of Zurich, Pfaffikon, Biel, Neuchatel
and others were invaded by peasants who brought with them their miscellaneous
collections.
Although Switzerland had no professional
archaeologists at that time, some of the
amateurs were quick to realize that these objects were not Roman. As Johannes
Aeppli, schoolmaster at Obermeilen on Lake Zurich, declared, 'They must come
from the most ancient inhabitants of our country.' Inspired by curiosity, Aeppli the
schoolmaster, Ferdinand Keller, teacher of English, Friedrich Schwab, a town
councillor of Biel, the notary Emanuel Muller-Haller and several other local
notabilities came to inspect the newly discovered palisades. They engaged
workmen to rake the bed of the lake with shovels, dredges, tongs and cramps;
each clod of mud was broken to pieces. At the end of some weeks the harvest was
impressive: stone and bronze axes, graving-tools, knives, daggers of hardened
wood, spoons, needles, awls of horn and bone, potsherds, vestiges of cloth, of
nets, of baskets and mats, the bones of wild and of domestic animals, piles of
grain, nuts and apples. This was proof that the stakes driven into the mud were the
supports of platforms upon which prehistoric men had built their dwellings.
The discovery caused a stir, for its magnitude
exceeded that of any other collection
of prehistoric finds. The Swiss lakes had provided the prehistorian with tools, arms,
household utensils, skulls, bones, and had enabled the world for the first time to
envisage the homes and daily life of a community in the distant past. Keller and
Schwab—after the discoveries in Lake Zurich and Lake Neuchatel they had
resigned their posts in order to devote themselves to prehistory—recalled that there
were villages on piles in Indonesia, New Guinea and some parts of central Africa.
To protect themselves, their families and their property against wild beasts and
attack by enemies, the inhabitants erected platforms over water or marsh.
Everything showed that the construction of the lakeside villages of Switzerland had
been dictated by similar requirements.
A selection of objects taken from the
Swiss lakes was placed on view in Paris
during the Universal Exhibition of 1867. It gave the general public an opportunity to
acquaint itself with the relics of the lakeside dwellers, as well as with flint
implements, sculptures and incised drawings of the Old Stone Age, newly found in
France. All Europe was agog for prehistory. True, the precise antiquity of the
lakeside villages was not known, but fresh discoveries followed —remains on the
shores of Lake Constance, of the Bavarian lakes, of the marshes of Swabia, in
eastern France, northern Italy and Austria. By the close of the exhibition the number
of recorded lakeside settlements was exactly two hundred.
Thanks to the devoted labours of the Swiss
prehistorians and museum officials,
scale models of these villages on piles were soon available, showing how the huts,
with walls of wattle and daub or split timbers, clay floors and thatched roofs, had
been erected on platforms and how the occupants had lived and worked—grinding
corn, making tools and pottery, spinning, weaving, preparing animal hides, cooking.
Subsequent years of drought revealed the remains of more lake villages, and in
1927 one was even reconstructed on its original site at Unteruhldingen on the
German side of Lake Constance. Narrow gangways or dikes linked the settlements
to the shore and its stretch of fields won from the forest, in which the lake villagers
had used stone axes for cutting down the trees. They grew barley, beans, flax and
wheat, and kept oxen, pigs, goats and sheep. The discovery of traces of roomy
cattle pens may indicate that the livestock spent the night in the safety of the village.
The accuracy of the reconstruction has
been disputed; and not all the experts agree
that the dwellings were built over water, contending rather that the piles and
platforms supported the huts over spits of marshy ground. Undeniably, however, the
people chose a watery environment for the settlements, many of which were
continuously occupied for a long period.
The culture of the lake dwellers differed
essentially from that of the food-gathering
hunters. The inhabitants of the lakeside villages certainly continued to hunt, and they
fished in the pools and gathered wild fruits; but they were first and foremost tillers of
the soil and pastoralists. They lived, not in small family groups or clans, but in large
village communities; it has been estimated that there were five thousand people in
the one discovered on the shores of Lake Neuchatel. Their agricultural skills
enabled them to produce and store enough grain to last from one harvest to the
next; their cereals and some of their domesticated animals were not native to
Europe. Nor would it have been possible to build those pile-dwellings without
stable, steerable boats from which to drive the stakes into the mud and in which to
transport the stones used for anchoring them. And when the hunting grounds close
to the settlement had no more game, a flotilla of canoes could set out for the
opposite shore.
Whence did these people come? At what
period did they live? A few decades after
the discovery of the Swiss lake villages it became possible to answer the second
question: the oldest of them dated from Neolithic times, about 3000 B.C. But those
lakeside settlements met so well the requirements of a farming population
surrounded by forest-dwelling hunters that many of the sites were occupied into the
Bronze Age and a few into Roman times. There is evidence of successive
conflagrations, whether accidental or the result of attack by hostile neighbours, and
of successive rebuilding. The way of life of the lake dwellers did not alter greatly, but
later generations had horses, cultivated vines and fermented the pressed grapes in
terracotta vessels.
The arrival of these alien immigrants
around the bigger lakes of Europe is part of
the larger story of the 'Neolithic Revolution' which prehistorians and archaeologists
have patiently pieced together. While the scattered populations of Europe were still
at Palaeolithic or Mesolithic stages of development, in the Near East a new way of
life had developed from about 7000 B.C. : farming communities living in permanent
villages. Their superior stone implements, especially axes, enabled them to clear
and cultivate land for growing a variety of good crops and herding domesticated
animals; their improved weapons made the hunting of game more rewarding. A
supply of food in excess of immediate needs furthered the development of crafts
and specialist craftsmen. These farmers flourished and, seeking new territories,
penetrated slowly into south-east Europe with their Neolithic culture, some by way
of the Danube Valley.
Although they could hardly have offered
organized resistance, the indigenous
people were probably hostile to the immigrants who settled in their hunting and
fishing grounds; perhaps the natives regarded domesticated cattle as 'fair game',
and raided the new settlements even if they did not often openly attack. But a village
built out over marsh or water would give the farmers the twofold advantage of a
good defensive site and no loss of hard-won cultivable land.
In time the older peoples were displaced
or absorbed as the Neolithic culture
spread across the whole of Europe. In time also, by similar stages, were introduced
the use of metals, the wheel, sailing ships and many other new techniques
originating in the Bronze Age river-valley civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
