Prehistoric Pile Dwellings of the Alps: Lake and Bog Villages

The prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps are the remains of hundreds of farming villages built along lakes, rivers and wetlands between about 5000 and 500 BC. Because their timbers, food remains and tools lie in waterlogged ground, they preserve everyday objects that almost never survive elsewhere. First recognised at Obermeilen on Lake Zurich in 1854, they became a symbol of national heritage in Switzerland and, in 2011, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Discovery at Obermeilen

The winter of 1853–54 was unusually dry, and the level of Lake Zurich fell lower than anyone could remember. At Obermeilen, on the eastern shore, local people reclaiming land from the exposed lake bed found rows of wooden posts, stone axes, pottery and bone tools in the mud. The schoolteacher Johannes Aeppli reported the finds to the Antiquarian Society of Zurich.

The society’s president, Ferdinand Keller, studied the site and concluded that the posts had supported houses built on platforms above the water. In 1854 he published the first of a series of reports on what he called “Pfahlbauten”, or pile buildings. His reconstruction drawings, showing villages perched on stilts over the lake and joined to the shore by footbridges, shaped the popular image of the lake dwellers for a century.

A wave of discoveries

Keller’s report set off a search along the lakes of Switzerland and neighbouring countries. Within a few years, sites were identified on Lake Constance, Lake Neuchâtel, Lake Biel, Lake Geneva and many smaller lakes and bogs. Water-level corrections on the Jura lakes in the late 19th century lowered the water and exposed many more settlements.

Today almost 1,000 pile-dwelling sites are known around the Alps. Collectors and museums gathered huge quantities of finds in the 19th century, and the lake dwellers became a source of Swiss national pride at a time when the modern federal state was young. They were presented as peaceful, hard-working ancestors, an image that owed as much to the politics of the day as to the evidence.

Stilts or shores: the great debate

From the 1920s onwards, some archaeologists began to question Keller’s picture. Excavations showed that many houses had stood on lake shores or in marshes that were only flooded at certain seasons, and that some floors had been laid directly on the ground. In Germany a bitter dispute over the interpretation, the so-called “Pfahlbaustreit”, ran through the 1930s to the 1950s.

Modern research shows that there was no single type. Some houses had raised floors on piles to cope with flooding, others stood on the ground, and lake levels changed over time, covering villages that had once stood on dry shores. Most settlements were on the shoreline or in wetland rather than far out over open water. The term “pile dwellings” has been kept as a convenient name for all of these waterlogged settlements.

Life in the lake villages

The settlements belonged to many successive Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age cultures. Villages typically consisted of a few to several dozen rectangular timber houses with thatched or shingle roofs, sometimes enclosed by palisades. People grew wheat, barley, peas, flax and opium poppy, kept cattle, pigs, sheep and goats, and also fished, hunted and gathered wild fruits and nuts.

Waterlogging has preserved an extraordinary range of material: bread and porridge remains, apples cut in half for drying, fishing nets, linen textiles, wooden bowls, dugout canoes and hafted tools. One of the oldest known wooden wheels with its axle, dated to around 3150 BC, was found in the Ljubljana Marshes in Slovenia, part of the same tradition (see invention of the wheel). These finds make the lake villages contemporary windows on the world of Ötzi the Iceman, who lived in the Alps around 3300 BC.

Notable sites

The sites span a wide area and many cultures. On Lake Constance, the German shore at Hornstaad and Unteruhldingen and the Swiss shore at Arbon have produced some of the richest Neolithic and Bronze Age finds. In Switzerland, the lakes of Zurich, Neuchâtel and Biel hold dense clusters of settlements, and the region around Lake Neuchâtel gave its name to the Iron Age La Tène culture, found at a different kind of waterlogged site.

In Austria, settlements in the Mondsee and Attersee lakes gave their name to the Neolithic Mondsee group, known for early copper working. In northern Italy, Isolino Virginia on Lake Varese and sites around Lake Garda preserve some of the oldest settlements of the region. In France, sites on Lake Annecy and Lake Bourget in Savoy are included, while the Ljubljana Marshes in Slovenia, the most easterly part of the group, have yielded dugout canoes as well as the famous wheel.

Myths and facts

A popular belief holds that lake dwellers lived on the water for defence, safe from enemies and wild animals. In reality, most villages stood on shores and wetlands chosen for access to water, fertile land, fish and transport by boat, and only some had palisades.

Another myth is that the lake dwellers were a single people or “race”. The settlements span more than 4,000 years and belong to many different cultural groups, from early Neolithic farmers to Late Bronze Age communities trading metal across Europe. What unites them is not ethnicity but the waterlogged conditions that preserved their remains.

Dating to the year

The pile dwellings are one of the best-dated groups of prehistoric sites in the world. Their oak and fir posts can be dated by dendrochronology, the matching of tree-ring patterns against a long regional sequence, which often gives the exact year in which a tree was cut down.

This precision shows that many villages were short-lived. Arbon-Bleiche 3 on Lake Constance, for example, was occupied for only about 15 years in the 34th century BC. Repairs and new houses can be traced year by year, revealing how villages grew, moved and were abandoned, often in step with changing lake levels and climate.

Protection and World Heritage

Because the remains lie under water or in wet soil, they are threatened by erosion, boat traffic, drainage and building. In June 2011 UNESCO inscribed 111 of the best-preserved sites as the World Heritage Site “Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps”, managed jointly by the six countries. Most of the sites are invisible to visitors and are protected precisely by being left in the ground.

Timeline

• c. 5000 BC: Earliest lakeside and wetland settlements in the Alpine region.
• c. 3400–3370 BC: Short occupation of Arbon-Bleiche 3 on Lake Constance.
• c. 3150 BC: Approximate date of the wooden wheel from the Ljubljana Marshes.
• c. 800–500 BC: Last pile-dwelling settlements as lake levels rise in the early Iron Age.
• 1853–54, winter: Low water on Lake Zurich exposes the site at Obermeilen.
• 1854: Ferdinand Keller publishes his first report on the “Pfahlbauten”.
• 1922: Open-air museum founded at Unteruhldingen on Lake Constance.
• 2011, June: 111 sites inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

The pile dwellings preserve the daily lives of prehistoric farmers in astonishing detail, from their meals to their clothes, and can be dated to the year. They also show how an archaeological discovery could shape national identity, and how later research corrected a romantic 19th-century image.