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Updated: June 6, 2025
The lake was inhabited by the lake-dwellers, quaint little people living in their curious structures built on poles sunk in the water.
In the most ancient, or lowest series of deposits, no traces of metal, either of bronze or iron, were discovered; and it is most probable that these lake-dwellers lived in as primitive a state as the South Sea islanders discovered by Captain Cook, and that the huts over the water in which they lived resembled those found in Papua and Borneo, and the islands of the Salomon group, to this day.
That the lake-dwellers should have fed so largely on the fox, while they abstained from touching the hare, establishes, says Rutimeyer, a singular contrast between their tastes and ours. Even in the earliest settlements, as already hinted, several domesticated animals occur, namely, the ox, sheep, goat, and dog.
The race which chiefly settled in the Swiss region is generally believed to have come from Asia, and advanced across Europe by way of the valley of the Danube. The native home of the wheat and barley and millet, which, as we know, the lake-dwellers cultivated, is said to be Asia.
They are distinguished by Heer under special names. The small barley and the small wheat of the lake-dwellers are among them. All in all there were ten well distinguished varieties of cereals, the Panicum and the Setaria or millet being of the number. Oats were evidently introduced only toward the very last of the lake-dwelling period, and rye is of far later introduction into western Europe.
Coryndon, busy with the silk made by the lake-dwellers spread over his knees, knew nothing of Leh Shin's disappearance. The fever of chase was in his blood, and he threw the flimsy yards through his hands. Nothing, nothing, and again nothing, and again he felt his heart swell with sudden, stifled excitement.
The lake-dwellers are imagined to have had some sort of stronghold there; and it is reasonably supposed that Romans, Franks, and Burgundians had each fortified the rock. Count Wala, cousin of Charlemagne, and grandson of Charles Martel, was a prisoner in its dungeon in 830 for uttering some words too true for an age unaccustomed to the perpetual veracity of our newspapers.
The earliest people who have left evidence of their existence near Canterbury belong to the Palæolithic Age; but as it is not known whether this remote prehistoric population occupied the actual site, or even whether the valley may not have then been a salt-water creek, it is wiser in this brief sketch to pass over these primitive people and the lake-dwellers who, after a considerable interval, were possibly their successors, and come to the surer ground of history.
Even the white spots on the leaflets have proved to be constant characters corresponding with noticeable differences in yield. Flax is another instance. It was already cultivated, or at least made use of during the period of the lake-dwellers, but at that time it was a species referred to as Linum angustifolium, and not the Linum usitatissimum, which is our present day flax.
Certainly the use of barley in the religious ritual of the ancient Hindoos as well as of the ancient Greeks furnishes a strong argument in favour of the great antiquity of its cultivation, which is known to have been practised by the lake-dwellers of the Stone Age in Europe.
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