prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps

In the winter of 1853 to 1854 the water in Lake Zurich fell unusually low. Workers digging up the lake bed to fill newly reclaimed land struck a dark layer with regular rows of wooden piles and the remains of a human culture. The Swiss antiquarian Ferdinand Keller read them as the remains of settlements and coined the term Pfahlbauten, pile dwellings, and the find set off a wave of interest across Europe.

Keller thought the villages had formed artificial islands. Today most are understood to have stood on marshy shores, raised on piles against occasional floods, and to have been submerged later as the lakes grew. They were built from about 5000 to 500 BC, and of some 937 known sites, 111 in six countries were inscribed in 2011: 56 in Switzerland, 19 in Italy, 18 in Germany, 11 in France, 5 in Austria and 2 in Slovenia.

Because the sites stayed waterlogged, organic material such as wood and textiles survived. Tree rings allow the timbers to be dated precisely, and the finds include dugout canoes, the oldest textiles in Europe, from about 3000 BC, and evidence of trade in flint, shells, gold and amber. In 2002 archaeologists in the Ljubljana Marshes in Slovenia found an ash-wood wheel with an oak axle, radiocarbon-dated to between 5,100 and 5,350 years ago, the oldest wooden wheel yet discovered.