ABSTRACT
The first report on Swiss lake-dwellings was published in the Bulletin of the Antiquarian Society of Zurich in September 1854. In the report, Ferdinand Keller described the prehistoric finds discovered at Meilen on the Lake of Zurich. Those archaeological remains had been brought to his attention earlier that year by Johannes Aeppli, the local school teacher. Keller also notified his readers of similar sites, with piles, in the Lake of Zurich and in the Lake of Bienne, in the West of Switzerland. The sensation created by the report was due to a daring interpretation of these finds as evidence of prehistoric villages built on piles in water. On the basis of the large number of objects, Keller drew the conclusion that they must denote the existence of a proper settlement, rather than isolated fishermen’s huts. He thought that the people who lived in them had probably been Celts because of the richly decorated bronze objects discovered primarily in the Lake of Bienne.
