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.[1] 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, twelve on that of Neufchatel, and ten 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
- ↑ Sur les Habitations lacustres.
