for defence, and it is an interesting point to note that when the means of attack were improved in the Bronze age, the settlements were built at a greater distance from the margin, so as to be farther away from the reach of the slingstone and of the arrow. In other words the attack and defence kept pace with each other, just as is the case at the present time with the large guns and the armour plates. Similar habitations[1] are described by Major Burton[2] in Dahomey, and by Captain Cameron[3] in Lake Mohrya, as the homes of certain African tribes, and they were used in Asia Minor in the Apamæan lake[4] as late as the middle of the fourteenth century, by the "Christian fishermen who live here on the lake in wooden huts built on piles." According to Herodotus, the pile-dwellings on Lake Prasias afforded to their inhabitants a secure protection against the arms of the Persians under Megabazus, in the march to the Hellespont and the conquest of Thrace.[5]
The pile-dwelling of Robenhausen,[6] which lies buried in a peat-bog on the south side of Lake Pfäffikon, may be taken as an example of one of these communities in the Neolithic age in Switzerland. It consisted of a platform made of timbers and roughly-hewn boards, fastened to upright piles by wooden pins, occupying an irregular quadrangular space about three acres in extent, and about 2000 paces from the old shore. On this
- ↑ Keller, Lake-dwellings, transl. by J. E. Lee, 8vo, 2d. edit, pp 496-500.
- ↑ Burton, Mem. Anthrop. Soc. Lond. i. p. 311.
- ↑ Cameron, Across Africa, 8vo, 1877, ii. p. 53.
- ↑ See Hitzig, Supplementa Tabulæ Syriæ, c. ii.; quoted by Keller, Lake-dwellings, p. 497.
- ↑ Herodotus, v. 16.
- ↑ For the history of pile-dwellings, see Keller, op. cit.
