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Underwater Archaeology Essay

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For over one hundred and fifty years inquiries and research projects, some more beneficial than others, have been made into the preserved remains of lake dwellings found across Europe. The unique discoveries of pile dwellings in Lake Zurich in 1854 ignited the frantic search for more prehistoric sites, attracting interest from antiquarians seeking to better our understanding of the past (Menotti, 2004). Hundreds of new sites were found and the works of early archaeologists like Munro and Keller provided a written record for the future. Ethnographic sources from the latter half of the 19th Century shaped the early interpretations, creating a romantic picture of Neolithic societies that inhabited these lacustrine dwellings (Fig. 1). It …show more content…

After this discovery many more sites in Switzerland, Germany, Poland, France, and Italy were recorded and artefacts collected or stolen (Munro 1886, 455). The techniques used may have been basic and rather makeshift; workers were employed to dig out a drained site, images made of the timber structures and many artefacts thrown away as rubbish (Dixon 1991, 2). These methods do not conform to modern archaeological practices but information was kept and provides a first step into lake-dwelling research (Morrison 1985). Many sites, of course, suffered irreversible damage after being exposed to the elements, or lost completely (Petrequin 1988, 7). Nearly seventy years passed before Keller’s interpretation of the Neolithic lake-dwellings was contested (Menotti 2004). A reinterpretation of the original view, that the Swiss Lake-dwellings were constructed on platforms out on the lake, was made by Vogt in 1955. He believed the timber remains did not support a structure far out over open water but were the remains of pile dwellings built on the shore. These structures were flooded then abandoned (Menotti 2004). This interpretation was based on a more scientific study based on the changes of the

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