Lacustrine Habitations of Switzerland.—In Switzerland a different class of monuments, illustrating the successive ages of stone, bronze, and iron, has been of late years investigated with great success, and especially since 1854, in which year Dr. F. Keller explored near the shore at Meilen, in the bottom of the lake of Zurich, the ruins of an old village, originally built on numerous wooden piles, driven, at some unknown period, into the muddy bed of the lake. Since then a great many other localities, more than a hundred and fifty in all, have been detected of similar pile-dwellings, situated near the borders of the Swiss lakes, at points where the depth of water does not exceed 15 feet.[[2]] The superficial mud in such cases is filled with various articles, many hundreds of them being often dredged up from a very limited area. Thousands of piles, decayed at their upper extremities, are often met with still firmly fixed in the mud.
As the ages of stone, bronze, and iron merely indicate successive stages of civilisation, they may all have coexisted at once in different parts of the globe, and even in contiguous regions, among nations having little intercourse with each other. To make out, therefore, a distinct chronological series of monuments is only possible when our observations are confined to a limited district, such as Switzerland.
The relative antiquity of the pile-dwellings, which belong respectively to the ages of stone and bronze, is clearly illustrated by the associations of the tools with certain groups of animal remains. Where the tools are of stone, the castaway bones which served for the food of the ancient people are those of deer, the wild boar, and wild ox, which abounded when society was in the hunter state. But the bones of the later or bronze epoch were chiefly those of the domestic ox, goat, and pig, indicating progress in civilisation. Some villages of the stone age are of later date than others, and exhibit signs of an improved state of the arts. Among their relics are discovered carbonised grains of wheat and barley, and pieces of bread, proving that the cultivation of cereals had begun. In the same settlements, also, cloth, made of woven flax and straw, has been detected.
The pottery of the bronze age in Switzerland is of a finer texture, and more elegant in form, than that of the age of stone. At Nidau, on the lake of Bienne, articles of iron have also been discovered, so that this settlement was evidently not abandoned till that metal had come into use.
At La Thène, in the northern angle of the lake of Neufchâtel, a great many articles of iron have been obtained, which in form and ornamentation are entirely different both from those of the bronze period and from those used by the Romans. Gaulish and Celtic coins have also been found there by MM. Schwab and Desor. They agree in character with remains, including many iron swords, which have been found at Tiefenau, near Berne, in ground supposed to have been a battle-field; and their date appears to have been anterior to the great Roman invasion of Northern Europe, though perhaps not long before that event.[[3]] Coins, which sometimes occur in deposits of the age of iron, have never yet been found in formations of the ages of bronze or stone.
The period of bronze must have been one of foreign commerce, as tin, which enters into this metallic mixture in the proportion of about ten per cent to the copper, was obtained by the ancients chiefly from Cornwall.[[4]] Very few human bones of the bronze period have been met with in the Danish peat, or in the Swiss lake-dwellings, and this scarcity is generally attributed by archæologists to the custom of burning the dead, which prevailed in the age of bronze.
POST-PLIOCENE PERIOD
From the foregoing observations we may infer that the ages of iron and bronze in Northern and Central Europe were preceded by a stone age, the Neolithic, referable to that division of the post-tertiary epoch which I have called Recent, when the mammalia as well as the other organic remains accompanying the stone implements were of living species. But memorials have of late been brought to light of a still older age of stone, for which, as above stated, the name Paleolithic has been proposed, when man was contemporary in Europe with the elephant and rhinoceros, and various other animals, of which many of the most conspicuous have long since died out.
Reindeer Period in South of France.—In the larger number of the caves of Europe, as for example in those of England, Belgium, Germany, and many parts of France, the animal remains agree specifically with the fauna of this oldest division of the age of stone, or that to which belongs the drift of Amiens and Abbeville presently to be mentioned, containing flint implements of a very antique type. But there are some caves in the departments of Dordogne, Aude, and other parts of the south of France, which are believed by M. Lartet to be of intermediate date between the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods. To this intermediate era M. Lartet gave, in 1863, the name of the “reindeer period,” because vast quantities of the bones and horns of that deer have been met with in the French caverns. In some cases separate plates of molars of the mammoth, and several teeth of the great Irish deer, Cervus megaceros, and of the cave-lion, Felis spelæa, have been found mixed up with cut and carved bones of reindeer. On one of these sculptured bones in the cave of Perigord, a rude representation of the mammoth, with its long curved tusks and covering of wool, occurs, which is regarded by M. Lartet as placing beyond all doubt the fact that the early inhabitants of these caves must have seen this species of elephant still living in France. The presence of the marmot, as well as the reindeer and some other northern animals, in these caverns seems to imply a colder climate than that of the Swiss lake-dwellings, in which no remains of reindeer have as yet been discovered. The absence of this last in the old lacustrine habitations of Switzerland is the more significant, because in a cave in the neighbourhood of the lake of Geneva, namely, that of Mont Saleve, bones of the reindeer occur with flint implements similar to those of the caverns of Dordogne and Perigord.
The state of the arts, as exemplified by the instruments found in these caverns of the reindeer period, is somewhat more advanced than that which characterises the tools of the Amiens drift, but is nevertheless more rude than that of the Swiss lake-dwellings. No metallic articles occur, and the stone hatchets are not ground after the fashion of celts; the needles of bone are shaped in a workmanlike style, having their eyes drilled with consummate skill.