292 EARLY MAN IN BRITAIN. [CHAP. vm. 



for defence, and it is an interesting point to note that 

 when the means of attack were improved in the Bronze 

 age, the settlements were built at a greater distance 

 from the margin, so as to be farther away from the reach 

 of the slingstone and of the arrow. In other words 

 the attack and defence kept pace with each other, 

 just as is the case at the present time with the large 

 guns and the armour plates. Similar habitations 1 are 

 described by Major Burton 2 in Dahomey, and by Cap- 

 tain Cameron 3 in Lake Mohrya, as the homes of certain 

 African tribes, and they were used in Asia Minor in the 

 Apamaean lake 4 as late as the middle of the fourteenth 

 century, by the " Christian fishermen who live here on 

 the lake in wooden huts built on piles." According 

 to Herodotus, the pile-dwellings on Lake Prasias afforded 

 to their inhabitants a secure protection against the arms 

 of the Persians under Megabazus, in the march to the 

 Hellespont and the conquest of Thrace. 5 



The pile-dwelling of Eobenhausen, 6 which lies buried 

 in a peat-bog on the south side of Lake Pfaffikon, may 

 be taken as an example of one of these communities in 

 the Neolithic age in Switzerland. It consisted of a plat- 

 form made of timbers and roughly-hewn boards, fas- 

 tened to upright piles by wooden pins, occupying an 

 irregular quadrangular space about three acres in extent, 

 and about 2000 paces from the old shore. On this 



1 Keller, Lake-dwellings, transl. by J. E. Lee, 8vo, 2d. edit, pp 

 496-500. 



2 Burton, Mem. Anthrop. Soc. Lond. i. p. 311. 



3 Cameron, Across Africa, 8vo, 1877, ii. p. 53. 



4 See Hitzig, Supplemented Tabulce Syrice, c. ii. ; quoted by Keller, 

 Lake-dwellings, p. 497. 



6 Herodotus, v. 16. 



6 For the history of pile-dwellings, see Keller, op. cit. 



