The tools, ornaments, and pottery of the bronze period in Switzerland bear a close resemblance to those of corresponding age in Denmark, attesting the wide spread of a uniform civilisation over Central Europe at that era. In some few of the Swiss aquatic stations a mixture of bronze and iron implements has been observed, but no coins. At Tiefenau, near Berne, in ground supposed to have been a battle-field, coins and medals of bronze and silver, struck at Marseilles, and of Greek manufacture, and iron swords, have been found, all belonging to the first and pre-Roman division of the age of iron.
In the settlements of the bronze era the wooden piles are not so much decayed as those of the stone period; the latter having wasted down quite to the level of the mud, whereas the piles of the bronze age (as in the Lake of Bienne, for example) still project above it.
Professor Rutimeyer of Basle, well-known to palaeontologists as the author of several important memoirs on fossil vertebrata, has recently published a scientific description of great interest of the animal remains dredged up at various stations where they had been embedded for ages in the mud into which the piles were driven.*
(* "Die Fauna der Pfahlbauten in der Schweiz" Basel 1861.)
These bones bear the same relation to the primitive inhabitants of Switzerland and some of their immediate successors as do the contents of the Danish "kitchen-middens" to the ancient fishing and hunting tribes who lived on the shores of the Baltic.
The list of wild mammalia enumerated in this excellent treatise contains no less than twenty-four species, exclusive of several domesticated ones: besides which there are eighteen species of birds, the wild swan, goose, and two species of ducks being among them; also three reptiles, including the eatable frog and freshwater tortoise; and lastly, nine species of freshwater fish. All these (amounting to fifty-four species) are with one exception still living in Europe. The exception is the wild bull (Bos primigenius), which, as before stated, survived in historical times. The following are the mammalia alluded to:—The bear (Ursus arctos), the badger, the common marten, the polecat, the ermine, the weasel, the otter, wolf, fox, wild cat, hedgehog, squirrel, field-mouse (Mus sylvaticus), hare, beaver, hog (comprising two races, namely, the wild boar and swamp-hog), the stag (Cervus elaphus), the roe-deer, the fallow-deer, the elk, the steinbock (Capra ibex), the chamois, the Lithuanian bison, and the wild bull. The domesticated species comprise the dog, horse, ass, pig, goat, sheep, and several bovine races.
The greater number, if not all, of these animals served for food, and all the bones which contained marrow have been split open in the same way as the corresponding ones found in the shell-mounds of Denmark before mentioned. The bones both of the wild bull and the bison are invariably split in this manner. As a rule, the lower jaws with teeth occur in greater abundance than any other parts of the skeleton—a circumstance which, geologists know, holds good in regard to fossil mammalia of all periods. As yet the reindeer is missing in the Swiss lake-settlements as in the Danish "kitchen-middens," although this animal in more ancient times ranged over France, together with the mammoth, as far south as the Pyrenees.
A careful comparison of the bones from different sites has shown that in settlements such as Wangen and Moosseedorf, belonging to the earliest age of stone, when the habits of the hunter state predominated over those of the pastoral, venison, or the flesh of the stag and roe, was more eaten than the flesh of the domestic cattle and sheep. This was afterwards reversed in the later stone period and in the age of bronze. At that later period also the tame pig, which is wanting in some of the oldest stations, had replaced the wild boar as a common article of food. In the beginning of the age of stone, in Switzerland, the goats outnumbered the sheep, but towards the close of the same period the sheep were more abundant than the goats.
The fox in the first era was very common, but it nearly disappears in the bronze age, during which period a large hunting-dog, supposed to have been imported into Switzerland from some foreign country, becomes the chief representative of the canine genus.
A single fragment of the bone of a hare (Lepus timidus) has been found at Moosseedorf. The almost universal absence of this quadruped is supposed to imply that the Swiss lake-dwellers were prevented from eating that animal by the same superstition which now prevails among the Laplanders, and which Julius Caesar found in full force amongst the ancient Britons.*
(* "Commentaries" lib 5 chapter 12.)
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. Of the three last, each was represented by one race only; but there were two races of cattle, the most common being of small size, and called by Rutimeyer Bos brachyceros (Bos longifrons, Owen), or the marsh cow, the other derived from the wild bull; though, as no skull has yet been discovered, this identification is not so certain as could be wished. It is, however, beyond question that at a later era, namely, towards the close of the stone and beginning of the bronze period, the lake-dwellers had succeeded in taming that formidable brute the Bos primigenius, the Urus of Caesar, which he described as very fierce, swift, and strong, and scarcely inferior to the elephant in size. In a tame state its bones were somewhat less massive and heavy, and its horns were somewhat smaller than in wild individuals. Still in its domesticated form, it rivalled in dimensions the largest living cattle, those of Friesland, in North Holland, for example. When most abundant, as at Concise on the Lake of Neufchatel, it had nearly superseded the smaller race, Bos brachyceros, and was accompanied there for a short time by a third bovine variety, called Bos trochoceros, an Italian race, supposed to have been imported from the southern side of the Alps. (Caesar "Commentaries" lib 5 chapter 12.) This last-mentioned race, however, seems only to have lasted for a short time in Switzerland.
The wild bull (Bos primigenius) is supposed to have flourished for a while in a wild and tame state, just as now in Europe the domestic pig co-exists with the wild boar; and Rutimeyer agrees with Cuvier and Bell,* in considering our larger domestic cattle of northern Europe as the descendants of this wild bull, an opinion which Owen disputes.**
(* "British Quadrupeds" page 415.)
(** "British Fossil Mammal." page 500.)
In the later division of the stone period, there were two tame races of the pig, according to Rutimeyer; one large, and derived from the wild boar, the other smaller, called the "marsh-hog," or Sus scrofa palustris. It may be asked how the osteologist can distinguish the tame from the wild races of the same species by their skeletons alone. Among other characters, the diminished thickness of the bones and the comparative smallness of the ridges, which afford attachment to the muscles, are relied on; also the smaller dimensions of the tusks in the boar, and of the whole jaw and skull; and, in like manner, the diminished size of the horns of the bull and other modifications, which are the effects of a regular supply of food, and the absence of all necessity of exerting their activity and strength to obtain subsistence and defend themselves against their enemies.
A middle-sized race of dogs continued unaltered throughout the whole of the stone period; but the people of the bronze age possessed a larger hunting-dog, and with it a small horse, of which genus very few traces have been detected in the earlier settlements—a single tooth, for example, at Wangen, and only one or two bones at two or three other places.
In passing from the oldest to the most modern sites, the extirpation of the elk and beaver, and the gradual reduction in numbers of the bear, stag, roe, and freshwater tortoise are distinctly perceptible. The aurochs, or Lithuanian bison, appears to have died out in Switzerland about the time when weapons of bronze came into use. It is only in a few of the most modern lake-dwellings, such as Noville and Chavannes in the Canton de Vaud (which the antiquaries refer to the sixth century), that some traces are observable of the domestic cat, as well as of a sheep with crooked horns and with them bones of the domestic fowl.
After the sixth century, no extinction of any wild quadruped nor introduction of any tame one appears to have taken place, but the fauna was still modified by the wild species continuing to diminish in number and the tame ones to become