Pile-dwelling villages
Lakes of the Plateau and Prealps: Zurich, Neuchâtel, Biel, Constance
Key figures: Johannes Aeppli, Ferdinand Keller, Emil Vogt
Historical Dictionary of Switzerland: Pfahlbauer, Ufersiedlungen
Before Switzerland. Between about 4300 and 800 BC there was no Switzerland, nor any people that could be called Swiss. There were no borders, states or names of peoples: the Helvetii appear in written sources only many centuries after the last lakeside villages were abandoned. The shore dwellers belonged to different communities, which archaeologists tell apart by their objects and name after the places where they were found: Egolzwil, Cortaillod and Lüscherz in the west, Pfyn and Horgen in the east, the Corded Ware culture. Similar villages stood all around the Alps, in Austria, Germany, France, Italy and Slovenia: their world matches no present-day state.
Villages on the shore. The villages appeared when the climate became drier and the lakes and marshes retreated, leaving wide shore terraces dry and close to the water. On the Plateau four main phases can be told apart: the Middle Neolithic (4300–3400 BC), the Late Neolithic (3300–2450 BC), the Early Bronze Age (1810–1490 BC) and the Late Bronze Age (1080–850 BC). The houses, most of them with raised floors to protect them from seasonal floods, were shielded on the lake side by breakwater palisades and linked to dry land by walkways of piles and planks. A village had a few dozen houses on about one hectare; in the Late Bronze Age Versoix-Bourg, on Lake Geneva, reached almost four hectares. When the water rose again, the village was abandoned and rebuilt higher up. People lived from farming and stock-breeding; hunting, gathering and fishing completed their diet.
1854: Ferdinand Keller's theory. In the dry winter of 1853–54 Lake Zurich fell to a level not seen for centuries. At Obermeilen the villagers found piles, stone tools, bones and potsherds, and handed them to the village schoolteacher, Johannes Aeppli. The Zurich archaeologist Ferdinand Keller, president of the Antiquarian Society of Zurich, recognised them as the remains of a prehistoric settlement. Drawing on a passage in Herodotus about the pile houses of Lake Prasias in Thrace, and on the engravings of New Guinea villages published by the explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville, he imagined houses built on platforms above the water. And, carried by the new national consciousness, he attributed them to the Celts: his first report is entitled Die keltischen Pfahlbauten in den Schweizerseen, "The Celtic pile dwellings in the Swiss lakes". Keller was the father of the theory, not the discoverer: piles in the lakes are mentioned as early as fifteenth-century manuscripts, and in western Switzerland collectors had long known about them.
"Lake-dweller fever". From the 1860s enthusiasm for the "lake dwellers" spread through every social class. Romantic reconstructions, paintings such as those by Auguste Bachelin (1867) and Albert Anker (1873), calendars, poems and historical parades brought them into the popular imagination. The young federal state, born in 1848, was looking for common ancestors for cantons that differed in language, religion and history: the lake dwellers became the symbol of a Switzerland united for thousands of years. They were contrasted with the people of dry land, imagined as more primitive and warlike. After the first Jura water correction (1868–1891), which lowered the lakes of Neuchâtel, Biel and Murten, a lively trade in finds grew up, sold to Swiss and foreign museums, and with it many forgeries.
What is legend and what is fact. The village suspended on a platform in the middle of the lake is a legend; so is a "lake people" different from the people of dry land; so is the idea that they were Celts and direct ancestors of the Swiss. Keller's theory remained almost unchallenged until the mid-twentieth century; then Emil Vogt's excavations in the Wauwilermoos near Lucerne reopened the question, and in 1955, in the volume Das Pfahlbauproblem marking the centenary of research, Vogt criticised the contrast between "lake dwellers" and "land dwellers". Recent excavations show that on the exposed shores there were both houses at ground level and houses with raised floors, on dry land and not in the middle of the water. Their inhabitants belonged to the same cultures as the inland villages, and they were not a single people: they were different communities, spread over territories that today belong to six countries. What is fact is the long history of these villages: almost four thousand years, with long breaks when the lakes rose, as between 2400 and 1800 and between 1500 and 1100 BC.
An archive under water. Precisely because they lay submerged in the mud, the villages preserve what disappears elsewhere: wood, seeds, textiles, baskets and wickerwork. The growth rings of the piles make it possible to date the buildings to the year (dendrochronology). From Lake Pfäffikon comes a wooden door from around 3700 BC, now in the Swiss National Museum in Zurich. In 2011 the "Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps" were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List: 111 sites in six countries, 56 of them in Switzerland, and at least 394 more are known in the country. They remain fragile, threatened by motorboats, the draining of marshes and the concreting of shores.
Albert Anker, Pfahlbauerin, 1873, Musée des beaux-arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds
Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Nineteenth-century reconstruction of a pile-dwelling village, after A. de Mortillet
Wellcome Collection, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Auguste Bachelin, idealised view of a lakeside village on Lake Neuchâtel, 1867, Swiss National Museum, Zurich
Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Model of a shore village, Laténium, Hauterive
Photo: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
The reconstructed houses of the prehistoric village of Gletterens, on Lake Neuchâtel
Photo: Roland Zumbühl, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The Robenhauser Riet, on Lake Pfäffikon, where the farmer Jakob Messikommer discovered and explored a prehistoric marsh village
Photo: Roland zh, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
The divers' base of the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern at Sutz-Lattrigen, on Lake Biel
Photo: Хрюша, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
The village of Obermeilen as imagined by Ferdinand Keller on a platform above the water, in his first report on pile dwellings, 1854
Ferdinand Keller, Mitteilungen der Antiquarischen Gesellschaft in Zürich, Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Chabrey-Pointe de Montbec, on Lake Neuchâtel: the piles of a prehistoric village emerge during the drought of winter 1921
Unknown author, Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Late Bronze Age house reconstructed in the Laténium park, Hauterive: the floor is raised on piles, on dry land
Photo: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
The open-air museum of Unteruhldingen (Germany), on Lake Constance, founded in 1922: its houses rebuilt above the water still follow the image born with Keller
Photo: Andreas F. Borchert, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The bay of Auvernier, on Lake Neuchâtel: under the water lie the Auvernier pile-dwelling sites, UNESCO World Heritage
Photo: Imagepro, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0