358 ARCHEOLOGY. 



lacustrians underwent no change during the age of bronze, it is nev- 

 ertheless probable that their zeal gradually diminished in consequence 

 of their ever-increasing relations with their neighbors, the Celts. 

 The tumuli which they raised during the second period are much less 

 high than those of the first age, and their dead have no longer the 

 folded position of the embryo in its mother' s womb ; they are simply 

 seated or even extended on the ground. The lacustrians never 

 adopted at least the custom of the incineration of the corpse, which 

 the Celts had imported from the east, and which, in the religious 

 sentiments of the former, must have seemed a crime against the dead. 



The duration of the lucustrian settlements of the age of bronze 

 was very long, if we judge of it from the thickness of the beds of 

 remains and the great diiference of the waste which appears in the 

 piles planted at different epochs on the same site; but the destruc- 

 tion of these settlements was as violent as that of the aquatic habita- 

 tions of the preceding age, for what remains of them under the surface 

 of the waters incontestably bears traces of pillage and conflagration. 

 A new people, armed with blades of iron, invaded the vast undulated 

 plain Avhich stretches between the base of the Alps and that of the 

 Jura, and after a war of more or less duration, finished by possessing 

 themselves of the wooden fortresses in which the lacustrians had 

 taken refuge. The catastrophe was nearly total, for, of seventy or 

 eighty villages which existed in the second age, eleven only present 

 traces of the following age, and of this number we can scarcely count 

 three of them which give indications of a prolonged occupation. The 

 lacustrian villages of Steinburg and G-raseren, in the lake of Bienne, 

 and of La Tene, in the lake of TSFeuchatel, were the only important 

 localities in which the primitive population could seek a refuge. 

 Perhaps some families of the vanquished might have become allied 

 with those of the invaders; but it is probable that the great mass of 

 the aborigines was destroyed or was forced, as a herd of slaves, to 

 adopt the customs of the Helvetian conqueror. The people disap- 

 peared, and history has not even recorded their ruin. The lacus- 

 trian villages, which had been during the course of so many centuries 

 the residence of a powerful race, were replaced by miserable huts, 

 where the families of fishermen, suspended above the waves, sought 

 a meagre existence. Some remains of rude pottery, dating from the 

 Roman epoch, show that these aquatic abodes were still inhabited at 

 the commencement of our era. 



The destruction of the greater part of the lacustrian villages having 

 taken place when iron began to be diffused through the country, we 

 are enabled to fix the epoch of invasion within the limits of a few 

 centuries. The Phocfisans of Massilia and the Belgic Cimbri, emi- 

 grants in the north of Gaul, had introduced the use of this metal, 

 the former from the commencement of the sixth century, and the latter 

 during the fourth century before the Christian era. By their means 

 iron arms must have soon superseded those of bronze among a great 

 number of the tribes with whom they had commercial intercourse. 

 Thus, towards the fifth or fourth century, iron, the true metal of war, 

 was more or less known to the G-auls, and perhaps the Lacustrian 



