HKB
(* Keller "Pfahlbauten, Antiquarische Gesellschaft in Zurich" Bd. 9 page 81 note.)
It will be remarked that one of the cabins is represented as circular. That such was the form of many in Switzerland is inferred from the shape of pieces of clay which lined the interior, and which owe their preservation apparently to their having been hardened by fire when the village was burnt. In the sketch (Plate 1), some fishing-nets are seen spread out to dry on the wooden platform. The Swiss archaeologist has found abundant evidence of fishing-gear, consisting of pieces of cord, hooks, and stones used as weights. A canoe also is introduced, such as are occasionally met with. One of these, made of the trunk of a single tree, fifty feet long and three and a half feet wide, was found capsized at the bottom of the Lake of Bienne. It appears to have been laden with stones, such as were used to raise the foundation of some of the artificial islands.
It is believed that as many as 300 wooden huts were sometimes comprised in one settlement, and that they may have contained about 1000 inhabitants. At Wangen, M. Lohle has calculated that 40,000 piles were used, probably not all planted at one time nor by one generation. Among the works of great merit devoted specially to a description of the Swiss lake-habitations is that of M. Troyon, published in 1860.*
(* "Sur les Habitations lacustres.")
The number of sites which he and other authors have already enumerated in Switzerland is truly wonderful. They occur on the large lakes of Constance, Zurich, Geneva, and Neufchatel, and on most of the smaller ones. Some are exclusively of the stone age, others of the bronze period. Of these last more than twenty are spoken of on the Lake of Geneva alone, more than forty on that of Neufchatel, and twenty on the small Lake of Bienne.
One of the sites first studied by the Swiss antiquaries was the small lake of Moosseedorf, near Berne, where implements of stone, horn, and bone, but none of metal, were obtained. Although the flint here employed must have come from a distance (probably from the south of France), the chippings of the material are in such profusion as to imply that there was a manufactory of implements on the spot. Here also, as in several other settlements, hatchets and wedges of jade have been observed of a kind said not to occur in Switzerland or the adjoining parts of Europe, and which some mineralogists would fain derive from the East; amber also, which, it is supposed, was imported from the shores of the Baltic.
At Wangen near Stein, on the Lake of Constance, another of the most ancient of the lake-dwellings, hatchets of serpentine and greenstone, and arrow-heads of quartz have been met with. Here also remains of a kind of cloth, supposed to be of flax, not woven but plaited, have been detected. Professor Heer has recognised lumps of carbonised wheat, Triticum vulgare, and grains of another kind, T. dicoccum, and barley, Hordeum distichum, and flat round cakes of bread; and at Robbenhausen and elsewhere Hordeum hexastichum in fine ears, the same kind of barley which is found associated with Egyptian mummies, showing clearly that in the stone period the lake-dwellers cultivated all these cereals, besides having domesticated the dog, the ox, the sheep, and the goat.
Carbonised apples and pears of small size, such as still grow in the Swiss forests, stones of the wild plum, seeds of the raspberry and blackberry, and beech-nuts, also occur in the mud, and hazel-nuts in great plenty.
Near Morges, on the Lake of Geneva, a settlement of the bronze period, no less than forty hatchets of that metal have been dredged up, and in many other localities the number and variety of weapons and utensils discovered, in a fine state of preservation, is truly astonishing.