THE WORLD BEFORE HISTORY—V
Professor JOHANNES RANKE
THE HOME LIFE OF PRIMITIVE FOLK
What the Lake Dwellings Tell
A
A PICTURE, of unequalled clearness of delineation, of the general conditions of the life and culture of Central European Man during the Neolithic Period, was given, according to the results of the celebrated researches of Ferdinand Keller and his school of Swiss archæologists, by the lake-dwellings in the Alpine lowlands. Whereas in cave districts the caves and grottos often served the men of the later Stone Age as temporary and even as permanent winter dwellings, in the watery valleys of Switzerland the Neolithic population built its huts on foundations of piles in lakes and bogs. In that period we have to imagine the Alpine lowlands still extensively covered with woods and full of wild beasts; at that time the huts standing on piles in the water must have afforded their inhabitants a security such as scarcely any other place could have given. The first founders and inhabitants of settlements of pile-dwellings in Switzerland belong to the pure Stone Period. In spite of their lake-dwellings the old Neolithic men of Switzerland appear to have possessed almost all the important domestic animals, but they also knew and practised agriculture. They lived by cattle-rearing, agriculture, hunting, and fishing, and on wild fruit and all that the plant world freely offered in the way of eatables. Their clothing consisted partly of skins, but partly also of stuffs, the majority of which seem to have been prepared from flax.
Beginnings of a Social Order
The endeavour of the settlers to live together in lasting homes protected from surprises, and in large numbers, is an unmistakable proof that they were aware of the advantages of a settled mode of life, and that we have not to imagine the inhabitants of the pile-dwellings as nomadic herdsmen, and still less as a regular race of hunters and fishermen. The permanent concentration of a large number of individuals at the same point, and of hundreds of families in neighbouring inlets of the lakes, could not have taken place if there had not been through all the seasons a regular supply of provisions derived principally from cattle-rearing and agriculture, and if there had not existed the elements of social order. Even the establishment of the lake-settlement itself is not possible for the individual man; a large community must have here worked with a common plan and purpose. Herodotus describes a pile-village in Lake Prosias, in Thracia, which was inhabited by Pæones, who defended it successfully against the Persian general Megabazos. The scaffold on which the huts were built stood on high piles in the middle of the lake; it was connected with the bank only by a single, easily removable bridge. Herodotus says:
The piles on which the scaffolds rest were erected in olden times by the citizens in a body; the enlargement of the lake-settlement took place later, according as it was necessitated by the formation of new families.