ABSTRACT
In 1854, the historian Ferdinand Keller announced the discovery of a prehistoric site on the Lake of Zurich and interpreted it as the remains of a settlement. Soon similar finds were made at other lakes in the Alpine region. Keller interpreted the fields of piles as the remains of platforms that had stood in open water, so he called them pile dwellings (Pfahlbauten in German). On 22 May of the same year, the Bernese geologist Alphonse Morlot started an expedition on the Lake of Geneva, along with Frédéric Troyon and François-Alphonse Forel (Figure 12.1, top). Their goal was a site assumed to be a lake-dwelling settlement near Morges – and in their luggage was a primitive diving bell. This was probably the first archaeological dive ever made (Speck 1981). Other researchers, such as Friedrich Schwab from Biel, also proposed building a diving apparatus, but this was never actually realized. In southern Germany, divers were used for the first time in the summer of 1873 to observe a lake-dwelling site in the Starnberg Lake in Bavaria (Schmid 2000).
