1894-95.] Dr R. Munro on Lake-dwelling Research. 401 
At the present time this region is richly cultivated, and looks as 
if it were a dead level, and it is only on close inspection that certain 
elevations of considerable extent, called Terpen^ scattered irregularly 
over the country, can he detected. It is on such elevations that 
villages and churches are generally built, and, till they accidentally 
attracted the attention of agriculturists within recent years, nobody 
seemed to have thought anything about their origin. They are now 
proved to have been originally constructed as pile-dwellings, pre- 
cisely similar to the Terremare, and are probably the actual mounds 
seen and described by Pliny. They might therefore be more appro- 
priately designated as marine-dwellings. 
Like the Terremare of Italy, the Terpen are largely excavated on 
account of their rich ammoniacal deposits, which are used by 
agriculturists as guano. The industrial remains found in the course 
of these operations are of a very miscellaneous character, and give 
a vivid picture of the civilization of their inhabitants from Roman 
times down to the twelfth century. Among the relics I noticed such 
objects as the shells of eggs (hen and goose), some of which were 
unbroken, a flute made of the shank bone of an animal, large casks, 
canoes, loom weights, toilet combs, iron bridle -bits, beads of glass 
and amber, Anglo-Saxon, Byzantine and Roman coins, bronze pots, 
pottery, etc., etc. 
Thus the spirit of research, awakened by the discoveries in 
Switzerland, stimulated archaeologists everywhere to be on the qui 
rive for such remains, and gradually led to the accumulation of 
extensive collections of lake-dwelling remains throughout Central 
Europe. 
In the progress of these continental discoveries Irish archaeologists 
could not fail to be highly interested, seeing that they themselves 
had already touched the fringe of the subject, and henceforth 
crannog-hunting was pursued among them with renewed vigour. 
The annals were now carefully searched for references to crannogs ; 
and many of the localities thus indicated were identified and 
partly explored. In 1857 Sir W. Wilde published the first part of 
his well-known catalogue of the antiquities in the Museum of the 
Royal Irish Academy, in which he gave an excellent account of 
the crannogs. In it the author states that 46 were known up 
to date, and predicts that many more would be exposed as the 
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