356 ARCHEOLOGY. 



must have had their own way with the poor natives — just as the 

 Spaniards mastered the Indians with ease when they invaded Mexico 

 and Peru, mounted on fiery steeds and launching death from a dis- 

 tance. 



It would seem that the lacustrian population of eastern Switzerland 

 suffered most from the conquest. The greater part of the pile-work 

 settlements of that region were completely abandoned, and since that 

 epoch their remains have been buried beneath the waters. The 

 aquatic villages of western Switzerland equally exhibit distinct traces 

 of conflagration; some, such as the celebrated Steinberg, (mountain 

 of stones,) situated in the lake of Bienne, were reconstructed on the 

 same site; others, after their destruction, were rebuilt at a greater 

 distance from the shore, so as to be beyond the reach of incendiary 

 projectiles; in fine, numerous groups of habitations were reared on 

 the shallows, till then unoccupied, of the lakes of Geneva, Neuchatel, 

 Bienne, and Morat. At the commencement of the age of bronze, the 

 lacustrian population of the country seems to have removed in mass 

 to escape the vicinity of the enemy who had seized upon the whole 

 of eastern Helvetia, now occupied by the Swiss, who speak the Ger- 

 man language. Withdrawn into the territory which forms the present 

 French-Switzerland, the lacustrians were fortunate enough to repress 

 all invasions, and at the same time to appropriate all the industrial 

 secrets which their conquerors had brought with them from the east. 

 Thanks to this contact with a more civilized race, a new era of pros- 

 perity seems to have opened for them, and the census of the lacustrian 

 population largely increased.* The villages of the age of bronze 

 much surpass in number those of the preceding period, and in the 

 fens of the Thiele, between the lakes of Bienne and Neuchatel, the 

 piles are found in such quantity as to have given rise to an actual 

 trade in wood. 



The wear and waste, more or less complete, of the posts sufiices 

 in general to indicate whether the villages whose sites have been 

 recognized pertained to the age of bronze or that of stone. Almost 

 all the piles of the more ancient epoch have been wasted away by 

 the waters to the very surface of the ground, while those of the 

 second period still project to the extent of one or even two metres. 

 In general, the lacustrian constructions underwent no change of form, 

 doubtless because the customs of the people had remained the same; 

 yet M. Troyon also mentions cabins built on rafts, and habitations 

 similar to the huts of the Bosphorus, perched, at different heights, on 

 long poles oblique and crossed like the interlaced boughs of a tree. 

 As to the choice of sites there is apparent, in the second age as well 

 as the first, a rare sagacity. The points of the shore over against 

 the places colonized by these old lacustrian tribes have, for the most 

 part, not ceased to be occupied even to our own day by cities or 



" By measuring the dimensions of fifty-one aquatic settlements of the age of stone, dis- 

 covered in 1860, M. Troyon computes that the total population of the lakes amounted to 

 31,875 persons. By an analogous calculation, sixty-eight villages of western Switzerland, 

 constructed during the age of bronze, would have contained a population of 42,500 

 inhabitants. 



