"Pile Dwelling Fever"

As children, most of us dream of finding treasure in our attics, or in our back yard. At least, I know I did. Television programs like Antique's Roadshow feed the horror vacui we suffer from in our lives with stories of junk turned to treasure over the course of a couple of minutes. News stories about some farmer, elsewhere, or, more tantalizing, right up the road, finding a hugely important horde of gold coins or the like fuels a culture of finder's keeper's.

Beyond hoarding, there is a social status that comes with collecting. Especially when it comes to artifacts. They symbolize more than an appreciation for a time in history. Artifacts in the private collection become stories of adventure, exemplary of wealth, and hopefully, the beginning of a legacy within an institution. But what happens once your artifacts get to wherever their going?

The Swiss Lake Dwellings

In the winter of 1853 and 1854, water levels in Switzerland dropped. This revealed prehistoric artifacts and "pile dwellings" that were known to have been built their between 3,000 and 6,400 years ago. The houses are called Pfaulbau in German.

The people that lived there so many millenia ago had an extremely varied diet. They hunted and gathered, as one would expect of such an old European settlement, but also fished in the lakes they built their homes on, practiced agriculture, and herded animals. Some of the most exciting finds are the preserved types of domesticated plants and obviously prepared foodstuffs (such as charred apples). On top of good eats, the bog-like conditions of the lake bed preserved organic material of incredible complexity, such as wood and even textiles.

The appearance of valuable cultural artifacts brought out archaeologists and treasure hunters alike. Granted, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between these two groups of people. The sudden fad by locals of collecting artifacts from the unsubmerging sites was named "Pfahlbaufieber" in German (pile dwelling fever). The artifact fishermen themselves were called "Pfahlbaufischer."

Portrait of Jakob Messikomer, 1902
via Wikimedia Commons

The Pfahlbaufischer were paid good money for their finds. Amateur archaeologists like Jakob Messikommer ensured that finds treasure seekers might pass up, such as the remains of food and other organic material, were collected and preserved. In the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s, there were several collectors that donated their collections to museums for further research and to be shared with the public, who were just wild about the Swiss lake dwellers.

The Pfahlbauten were extremely exciting because they suddenly presented a picture of life where death had previously held all the answers. Before this, the archaeological record on prehistoric Europe had been filled in by grave and military sites. On top of this, most research covered times after Roman occupation. The Pfahlbau gave Europe an independent historical identity. As Armando Mombelli of swissinfo so eloquently put it, "history no longer began with the Romans."

History in the Basement

However, at the turn of the century, Pfahlbaufieber waned. Information on the lake dwellers was relegated to that unobtainable world of academia. Museums in the United States had been the recipients of several collections, but after the beginning of World War I, all research stopped. With public interest at nil, acquisitions of European material from prehistory stopped also.

Unfortunately, it seems the wars of the 20th century created a bias against German-speaking parts of Europe; even those regions that held keys to the ancestry of the continent. Today, institutions like the Milwaukee Public Museum and the University of Glasgow are leading the way by offering information on their collections from the Robenhausen village online, but it took a century to get back in the public eye.

J. Messikomer & team digging at Robenhausen
via Wikimedia Commons

Sources (not linked above)

Arnold, Bettina. "The Lake-Dwelling Diaspora: Museums, Private Collectors, and the Evolution of Ethics in Archaeology." In The Oxford Handbook of Wetland Archaeology, edited by Francesco Menotti and Aidan O'Sullivan, 875-886. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.