Lake-Dwellers

The habit of constructing platforms for habitations in lakes has been found among various savage peoples of our own day, as in Africa, the Malay Archipelago, and Brazil. In Ireland and Scotland it continued down to historic times. See CRANNOG. The most famous lake-dwellings are those of prehistoric Switzerland. These were utterly unknown until 1854, when an unusual subsidence of the lake of Zurich led to the discovery. The Museum of Zurich is especially rich in remains of this culture; its representative student is Ferdinand Keller. The culture belongs partly to the STONE AGE and partly to the BRONZE and IRON AGES (q.v.); the trans i tion from the earlier to the later culture, as represented by the abandonment of stone implements for bronze, has been most succe fully studied here. The change was due to influences IMG:content-0998.jpg:[graphic] Restoration of one of the Habitations of the Swi Lake-Dwellers. spreading from Italy. The dates for the highest antiquity of the Swi lake-dwellings are not fixed, but they were in use 2000 В.С.