ABSTRACT
Despite the excellent preservation conditions in the pile dwellings along the lakesides of the Alpine region, only fragments of many of the finds and remnants of the features in particular come to light. It is, therefore, often necessary to fill in the missing pieces in order to illustrate the original function of the millenniaold remains. Neolithic arrows may serve as an example of this phenomenon: unlike the numerous flint arrowheads, the wooden shafts are extremely rare. The fletching, which is necessary to ensure the optimal trajectory of the arrow, is an even more unusual and always fragmentary find – as was the case with the arrows that belonged to the ‘Man in the Ice’. That is why reconstruction drawings, models of houses and replicas were created as early as the nineteenth century (Speck 1981: 104, 106). Even at that time, these methods were not applied for the sole purpose of scientific understanding, but mainly for didactic reasons, in collections and museums. Who of us has not tried out the bow drills used for making shaft holes in stone axes that were on display for the public to experiment with in numerous old local history museums (Zurbuchen 2001: 23)?
