The Mason County journal. [volume] (Shelton, W.T.) 1886-1927, 1890-03-28
THE LAKE JEWELLERS.
The First and the Last of Race That On,
Inhabited Switzerland.

The First and the Last of q Race That Once
Inhabited Switzerland.
The recent discovery of tombs of the
lake jewellers has awakened renewed
interest in the people of prehistoric
Switzerland. Tourists will hardly be
content any more to pass through Swift
erland 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 the greatest antiquities
of the whole world. There are hun
dreds and thousands of specimens of
stone, wood, cloth, weapons and orna-
ments of a people whose towns were old
a thousand years before gray old ex-
cavated POmpen was ever thought of.
To Prof Ferdinand Keller before all
others the world is indebted for knowl-
edge of what it probably was before the
time of history. All the later years of
his life were devoted to the investiga-
ton of the lake dwellers' villages, and
no man was so competent as he to re-
juvenate those dead old skulls and relics,
lifting a thousand years from the for
gotten past into the middle of the nine
teenth century.
Keller has translated the hero
glyphics of the dead ages. He has ex-
planned how the antiquarians have
divided all the prehistoric past into the
ages of stone, of bronze and of iron; how
the lake jewellers of Switzerland were
first discovered at Meilen, on the lake of
Zurich in 1929, and more fully revealed in
1884; and how the world at large shut
ton made to history. He has told, too,
how the patient handwriting investi-
gators, of whom he is chief, have uncov-
cred and dug out enough of these buried
towns to prove that our ''best families"
don't need to break off their ancestral
line with William the Conqueror, or any
other William. Those of us who think
we might be proud of our far-off progen-
itors may yet be gratified to see some
shrewd Yankee following our line clear
back to Orgetorix, the youngest off
spring of our Celtic grandfathers of the
lake jewellers.
If our American tourist will take
little more time, jump on the cars, and
ride out to RObenhausen, on the lake of
Pfaffikon, he will there witness with his
own eyes the turf beds and the lake Civ
ing up the secrets of the age of stone.
Robenhausen is a town of the stone age
period. 1t was perhaps twelve hundred
feet square, standing on platform built
OH hundred thousand piles driven into
the bottom of the shallow lake, about
three hundred yards from the shore
Like all the other Swiss lake towns it
was connected with the land by long
bridge, also built on piles. Of course
the visitor now will see little except
chopped-off piles sticking in the peat,
and among them the debris of the vii
lagos that have gone to ruin. Roben-
hansen had been partly burned down and
built up again on the same site, but at in
tervals of ages, probably apart; so thatthe
peat bed shows on being opened three sets
of piles. one above the other. The
only way of jud ging of the probable age
of these lake dwellings is by estimating
the centuries required for peat beds to
form. Reckoned in this manner, the
age of the first town built at the bottom
of Robenhausen must be prodigious.
In these lake villages there once
lived people as much civilized, posi-
bly,, as are the Mexicans of to-day.
They titled the soil, they dwelt 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 annals. History
stops stOck-still with Switzerland only
sixty years farther back than the birth
of Christ. The nearest reference there
is in history to these Swiss lake jewellers
is where Caesar tells how quarter of a
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 altogether 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 SUMMER cline and more grateful
soil than were found amid the Alps
5. ii. Byers, in Harper's Magazine.