Staunton vindicator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1860-1896, 1890-02-28
PEOPLE THAT CESAR KNEW.
The First and Last of the Lake DweIlers
of Switzerland.

The First and Last of the Lake Dwel1ers
of Switzerland.
The recent discovery of tombs of the lake
dwellers has awakened renewed interest in
the people of prehistoric Switzerland. Tour
lists will hardly be content any more to pass
through Switzerland without visiting one or
more of the museums where the collections
made from the excavated lake dwellings are
exhibited.
Perhaps the most extensive exhibition of
these relics is the one at the Helm house. in
Zurich. There one sees what are in fact Tie
greatest antiquities of the whole world. There
are hundreds and thousands of specimens of
stone, wood, cloth, weapons and ornaments
of a people whose towns were old thousand
years before gray, old excavated Pompeii was
ever thought of.
To Professor Ferdinand Keller before all
others the world is indebted for knowledge
of what it probably was before the time of
history. All the later years of his life were
devoted to the investigation of the lake dwell
ers' villages, and no man was so competent
as he to rejuvenate those dead old skulls and
relics, lifting thousand years from the for
gotten past into the middle of the Nineteenth
century.
Keller has translated the hieroglyphics of
the dead ages. He has explained how the
antiqusrians have divided all the prehistoric
past into the ages of stone, of bronze and of
iron; how the lake dwellings of Switzerland
were first discovered at Meilen, on the lake
of Zurich, in 1929, and more fully revealed
in 1854, and how the world at large shut
its eyes, almost, to the great contribution
made to history He has told, too, how the
how 81
he is chief, have uncovered and dug out
enough of these buried towns to prove that
our ''best families" don't need to break of
their ancestral line with William the Con
queror, OF with any other William. Those
of US who think we might be proud of gu,
far off progenitors may yet be gratiied tt
see some shrewd Yankee following our line
clear back to Orgetorix, the youngest off
spring of our Celtic grandfathers of the lax,
jewellers.
If our American tourist will take little
more time, jump on the cars, and ride out tt
Robenhausen, on the lake of Pfafikon, he
will there witness with his own eyes the turf
beds and the lake giving up the secrets Of
the age of stone. Robenhausen is a town OF
the stone age period. 1t was perhaps ], 2Ot
feet square, standing on platform built OF
hundred thousand piles driven into the
bottom of the shallow lake, about 800 yard.
from the Shore Like all the other Swiss lake
towns it was connected with the land by {;
long bridge, also built on piles. Of cours,
the visitor now will see little except chopped
off piles sticking in the peat, and among them
the debris of the villages that have gone to
ruin. Robenhausen had been partly burned
down and built up again ON the same site, but
at intervals of ages, probably, apart; so that
the peat bed shows on being opened three sets
of piles, one above the other The only way
of judging of the probable age of these lake
dwellings is by estimating the centuries re-
quired for peat beds to form. Reckoned in
this manner, the age of the first town built al
the bottom OF Robenhausen must be pro
digious.
In these lake villages once lived people as
much civilized, possibly, as are the Mexicans
of today. They titled the soil, they dweIt in
houses, they wove fine linen, they had articles
of luxury, and traded more or less with other
countries. Of them there are no written an
nails. History stops stock still with Switzer-
land only sixty years further back than the
birth of Christ The nearest reference there
is in history to these Swiss lake dwellers is
where Caesar tells how quarter of million
armed Helvetians, under Divico, burned down
their homes and marched into Gaul. Caesar
himself, after great battling, defeated them,
and drove them back into their own country.
There is now much reason to believe that
these ,Helvetians were the last of the lake
jewellers. 1t is known that most of the lake
villages were destroyed by fire. and it is alto
gether probable that when Caesar compelled
the people to return they established new
homes on the shore instead of rebuilding
their lake dwellings, which they had left in
search of a SUMMER cline and a more grateful
soil than were found amid the Alps.-ssThe
Lake Dwellers," by s, j. NJ. Byers, in Har
pers Magazine.