Robert Munro

“ Although no timbers were visible at the time of our visit, the whole surface of the enclosure being green with grass, and the surrounding moss covered with heather and bog plants, its situation and character indicated its true nature to those experienced in lake-dwellings, and a very slight excavation at once confirmed this view. Beginning in the centre, the diggers exposed beneath the shallow layer of vegetable soil the familiar features of a fascine-dwelling. ”

“ It is, indeed, to such catastrophes that we owe much of our information, as the sudden interruption of busy life-scenes in such a manner and especially when accompanied by circumstances that tended to preserve the ruins from decay, has been the means of supplying us, as it were, with a photographic picture of the habits, customs, and industries of the people; and it requires only a sufficient number of such instances to be able, from a comparative examination of the recovered relics, to construct a fair scale of the progressive civilisation and culture of the lake-dwellers. ”

“ A splendid bridge now spans the opening of the Limmat, and on both sides of it are elegant promenades, gardens, and ornamental quays, which occupy what was formerly part of the lake. The filling up of such a great area of lake-bottom involved the use of dredgers, which, with revolving buckets, raised stuff from the most convenient shallows along the shore, and having dropped it into boats, it was then transported to its final destination. Among the localities selected for these operations were the Grosser Hafner and the outskirts of the Bauschanze. ”

“ Struck with the elegance and beauty of the stone weapons and implements so profusely scattered over the land, they seized the idea, occasionally previously mooted by writers in other countries, but hitherto never seriously considered, that there was a time when people were entirely ignorant of the use of metals, and, in the prosecution of their social industries, had to depend exclusively on such tools as could be manufactured out of stone, horn, wood, etc. ”

“ It is true that the specimens of pottery are coarse and devoid of ornamentation; but this might have been due to social causes rather than a deficiency of knowledge, as we find that in some of the other early stations, as for example Schussenried, the pottery is highly ornamented. In the struggle for existence the original founders of the lake-dwellings, surrounded by fierce aborigines and wild animals, had to pay more attention to the mere necessaries of life than to art. ”

“ A brass bowl, hammered out of the solid; two brass vessels, made of small pieces most curiously riveted together; a brooch of handsome workmanship; a variety of bone pins and implements; deer-horn combs, of very great artistic merit; horn discs, like backgammon men; knives, hooks, and hatchets of iron; swords and spear-heads; an iron implement, like what a baker uses for putting his loaves in the oven, made of sheet iron, curiously riveted together, and having in the centre a circular ornament, with a cross in it, that has evidently once had an arabesque pattern on it ”

“ Henceforth primeval antiquities of every description, the merest "waifs and strays" of humanity, things which previously were utterly ignored, were now eagerly collected, described, and catalogued; and in every centre of intelligence societies and journals were founded with the express object of following up the new found trail of prehistoric man. Since then the problem of man's place in nature has come largely to the front, and now appeals for its solution to all departments of science, and to all legitimate processes of reasoning. ”

“ But, in fact, there is much less uniformity in these terremare than is often found in the dwellings of animals; therefore I maintain logically, that even prehistoric men changed their mode of living according to place, time, and circumstances; and that the terramaricoli did not live solely in pools of water, as some assert, but had settlements both in the water and on dry land, and that the terramara beds are the results of the latter. In some of the terrestrial settlements they probably had pile-dwellings, while in others they lived in huts or tents. ”

“ In La Tène both stone and bronze objects are quite the exception, while those of iron are not only in great abundance, but, from their variety and style of art, clearly show that the working and forging of this metal had reached a great state of perfection. In short, we have inherent [Pg 303] evidence that the civilisation of the Bronze Age was now superseded by one of a totally different character, and yet it would seem that this complete change had been accomplished independent of, and prior to, the advent of the Romans. ”

“ From the final departure of the Romans to the conquest of the kingdom of Strathclyde by the Northumbrian Angles, a period of several centuries, this unfortunate people had few intervals of peace, and with their complete subjugation ended the special functions of the lake-dwellings as a national system of protection. No doubt some of them, as well as caves and such hiding-places, would continue to afford refuge to straggling remnants of natives, rendered desperate by the relentless persecution of their enemies ”

“ On the east side the old lake-shore is 3,000 yards distant, and towards this, notwithstanding its greater distance, there extended a gangway, the remains of which can still be traced. Underneath the grass there is a thick deposit of peat, which has been utilised as fuel according to the needs of the surrounding community; and a mere glance at the locality shows that the whole expanse is but an encroachment of the peat on what was formerly part of the lake. The meadow belongs to peasant proprietors, among whom it is parcelled into small plots. ”

“ It seems to us, if we do not err, that there is something of settlement and duration. Man did not meet there only to arrange and devour the feast, but to employ himself besides in domestic avocations, in preparing implements and arms, to sew garments, and make nets—in a word, to inhabit them; besides, to exercise the practices of their religious worship, and, perhaps, also to burn their dead, and all these after the fashion of barbarians, such as the people of the marl-beds must have been. ”

“ I fancy the true explanation is that the lake-dwellers became first acquainted with metal instruments in the form of imported bronze objects, especially swords and daggers, and that this suggested to them, and directly led to, the discovery of the art of reducing the pure metal from the copper ore. Local or peripatetic coppersmiths, in trying to imitate these imported implements, went on manufacturing copper objects until they learned the art of hardening it by the proper admixture of tin. ”

“ Sometimes, for the sake of protection, houses were built upon piles driven into a morass or bottom of a lake, as for example in Barton Mere, near Bury St. Edmund's, where bronze spear-heads have been discovered, one 13 inches long, among piles and large blocks of stone, as in some of the lakes in Switzerland. Along with them were vast quantities of the broken bones of the stag, roe, wild boar, and hare, to which must also be added the urus, an animal proved to be wild by its large bones, with strongly-marked ridges for the attachment of muscles. ”

“ Near the village of Heimenlachen, in the Canton of Thurgau, there is a peat-moor covering about 15 acres, in which the peasants while cutting peat were occasionally turning up objects of human industry deeply buried, but they have been either dispersed among the curious or thrown away. A large skull of an ox, supposed to be that of a urus, lay for years exposed among a heap of rubbish, but when subsequently searched for, it could not be found. Among these relics were celts of nephrite, stone hammers, various articles of bone and horn, and some fragments of pottery and basket-work. ”

“ The substitution of bronze for these materials marks a decided change in the culture and civilisation of the lake-dwellers—a change which becomes further modified by the introduction of iron. We have thus a great variety of lake-dwellings, distinguishable from each other generally by the character of their industrial remains, according to the particular civilisation which prevailed at the period of their habitation, some dating from the pure Stone Age, others from the Bronze Age, while others again bear the imprint of various later civilisations, as Roman, Celtic, Carlovingian, Slavish, etc. ”

“ If any further evidence were required to show the skill of the early lake-dwellers in the arts of spinning and weaving, and the extent to which they followed agricultural pursuits and the rearing of domestic animals, I have only to call attention to the vast number of spindle-whorls, loom-weights, etc., which are everywhere to be met with; the corn-crushers, yokes for cattle (Fig. 184, No. 1) , field hoes, picks, and other agricultural implements found on the sites of the earliest settlements, as Robenhausen, Schaffis, Schussenried, etc. ”

“ Though the growth of peat is slow, and almost imperceptible to individual observers, whose lifetime is generally too short to mark its progressive character, it has proved a most formidable antagonist to lake settlements by destroying their lacustrine character, and thus compelling their inhabitants to abandon them altogether. The peat has, in some instances, actually engulfed entire villages, with the accumulated débris of their industrial equipments, thus hermetically sealing up everything in one of the best antidotes to natural decay. ”

“ Sir W. R. Wilde, undoubtedly one of the foremost authorities on Irish crannogs, assigns them to the Iron Age. "Certainly," says he, "the evidences derived from the antiquities found in ours, and which are chiefly of iron, refer them to a much later period than the Swiss; while we do not find any flint arrows or stone celts, and but very few bronze weapons, in our crannogs. ”

“ Between those objects in which iron is used as an ornament (all of which are of the same style as the bronze objects) , and the La Tène weapons, there is a wide gap which is not bridged over by any relics found in the lake-dwellings. In short, the evolutionary stage between the smelting of bronze and the forging of iron is here represented by a corresponding hiatus between the styles of art of the two periods more striking than that which distinguishes the neolithic from palæolithic industrial remains. ”

“ The relics of human industry collected during these systematic explorations, with the exception of a few in the Museum of Vienna, are deposited in the handsome new Museum at Laibach, where they form a remarkably complete and interesting demonstration of the culture and civilisation of the lake-dwellers. ”

“ When, however, the works were completed, the permanent effect on these lakes, especially on Lake Neuchâtel, was very marked—harbours, jetties, and extensive tracts of shore-land being left high and dry by the subsiding waters. This was the harvest-time of archæology. Many of the lacustrine abodes became dry land, and were visited by crowds of eager searchers; even fishermen forsook their normal avocations, finding it more profitable to fish for prehistoric relics. ”