Pile dwellings continued to be built during the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.
In 1865 Virchow discovered pile dwellings in northern Germany, and in 1870 he started to excavate hill forts.
Anthropologists now believe that the pile dwellings may have been built above swampy land on the lake shore rather than above the waters of the lakes themselves.
Although the clay floors were used especially as a precaution against fire, the vast majority of pile dwellings appear to have ended in conflagration either accidental or the result of enemy attack.
The site is remarkable for its wooden and bone farming tools, the bird designs carved on bone and ivory, the superior carpentry of its pile dwellings (a response to the damp environment), a wooden weaving shuttle, and the earliest lacquerware and rice remains yet reported in the world (c. 5000 4750 bce).
Until 2011, the Ledro valley (Trentino, northern Italy) was known only for the pile-dwelling site of Molina di Ledro, dating to the Bronze Age.
Lootsma cites a number of these invisible forces — market demands precipitating a "slick" of houses-with-gardens in the Netherlands, political constraints generating "piles" of dwellings on the outskirts of Hong Kong, the cultural preference for white brick causing a "white cancer" of housing estates in the Dutch province of Friesland.
They stripped their own dwelling, piling toilets, metal screen doors, kitchen cabinets, the furnace and copper pipes into a moving van. "They said, 'Why should someone else get it?' " Gardner told me.
Lake Dwellings, German Pfahlbauten: "pile structures," remains of prehistoric settlements within what are today the margins of lakes in southern Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy.
The first inhabitants of the region were the prehistoric peoples whose hut dwellings rose from pile foundations driven into the shores of the lake.
