Submerged Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age settlements hold a crucial status among waterlogged archaeological sites. Their remains have been found in lakes and bogs, as well as occasionally along coasts, while the initial appearance of such dwellings can be tied to the emergence of agriculture in Eurasia, some 8,000 years ago. As is well known, the adoption of farming lifestyles marked a pivotal shift in human activity, giving rise to permanent settlements featuring durable wooden structures like houses, palisades, and pathways, alongside a greater variety and complexity of artefacts. While organic materials, such as wood, bark, fibres, seeds, fruits, and faunal remains rarely stand the test of time on dry land, they can endure perfectly preserved for millennia within water-saturated and oxygen-free sediments. When the remains of settlements are detected in such extraordinary conditions, they can provide profound insights into past environments, economies, and technologies.
The stage for such studies was set in the 1820s, when the first discoveries of ancient structures were made in Swiss lakes. It was in 1854, though, that the transformative moment occurred. Ferdinand Keller, an antiquarian in Zurich, coined the term Pfahlbauten, which in English and French corresponds to ‘pile dwellings’ or palafittes. Keller’s research drew inspiration from ethnographic illustrations of stilt houses in Papua New Guinea, a breakthrough that marked the birth of European settlement archaeology. Previously, the dominant focus of the discipline had been easy-to-discover burial mounds and the insights into the world of the dead that they disclosed. Now archaeology underwent a groundbreaking shift: for the first time, it could set its sights on the living and gain insights into the everyday routines of past societies. As early as the 19th century, important information about the economies sustaining past societies emerged. It was pioneering archaeobotanical discoveries from the pile dwellings, for example, that provided the first evidence for human cultivation of cereals, confirming that the origins of such settlements lay among agricultural societies. An absence that was keenly felt during this trailblazing era, though, was reliable dating methods capable of determining the true antiquity of the pile dwellings. The solution was to label them as simply ‘Celtic’, which mainly served as a means to underscore that they pre-dated the Roman period.
Over time, it has become clear that such sites, and the wooden structures, stratified layers, ceramics, tools, textiles, and sundry everyday items that they showcase, are remnants from the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Our current understanding is that lake dwellings in the southern Alpine region first emerged around 5200 BC, before spreading north of the Alps approximately a millennium later. The practice of building such settlements eventually died out around 800 BC, with the underlying reasons for this still unclear. The significance of these sites was recognised in 2011, when UNESCO granted World Heritage Site status to 111 significant examples in the Alps, out of a total of almost 1,000 sites in the area, which features a notable concentration in the northern region of the Alps. Contrary to initial beliefs, though, the distribution of the submerged remains of comparable settlements also extends into the broader Mediterranean region, challenging previous views about their restricted geographical spread. The idea that pile dwellings were exclusive to the Alpine region or represented a distinct ‘pile-dwelling’ civilisation has to be reconsidered.
