provincial notables, priests and ministers, schoolteachers, and even farmers with a passion for archaeology. This enthusiasm for national archaeology was unquestionably caused by the discovery of the palaffitic (built on poles) lake dwellings in Obermeilen (Lake Zurich) in 1854. The repercussions of this find were enormous, as much as for scientific as for ideological reasons.

In fact, it would be preferable to speak of the “invention” of the lake dwellings by Keller in 1854. Pile fields on the shores of Lake Bienne had already been discovered by some Bernese antiquarians a few years earlier, but those antiquarians did not advertise their discoveries in the way that Keller did. Above all, Keller gave a the dwellings a global and coherent interpretation. All of the sites discovered on the shores of the Swiss lakes were supposed to be of the same nature, that is, vestiges of prehistoric settlements. According to Keller, they had not been covered by water, as was first thought, but had been built on platforms above the water. Although attributing them at first specifically to the celts (a point he preferred to shelve later on), Keller used the durability of this type of dwelling from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age—or even the Iron Age—as proof of continuity between all our Swiss ancestors, in spite of cultural evolution. Keller’s interpretation was met with enthusiasm and remained almost unquestioned for about three-quarters of a century, because, apart from the strong authority Keller had over research in Switzerland, his interpretation satisfied certain ideological expectations.

The Switzerland of 1848 was actually a new state, which had at last achieved national unification after a civil war (the Sonderbund War) in 1847. Beyond all religious, ethnic, and linguistic divisions, a new democratic system of government was established. Moreover, Swiss society itself was changing owing to increased industrialization and urbanization. These changes provoked a need to invoke the sources of a common identity from the past. At the same time, historical research developed a critical trend, debunking the fictitious and mythical nature of certain medieval national legends, such as that of William Tell. Thus, patriots turned to prehistory, which offered liberalism the apparent confirmation of the doctrine of continuous progress, a source of unlimited hope for the future of mankind. Among all prehistoric pasts, the vision of lake dwellers proposed by Keller and his contemporaries was more than welcome.

First was the fact that these remains were of houses and the vestiges of everyday life, which gave these particular ancestors a popularity and a “closeness” that no number of burials or military camps could. Second, modifying the drawing that had inspired him—of the lake dwellers of New Guinea in a travelogue by the explorer Dumont d’Urville—Keller put all the dwellings on one platform shared by the whole village. These small communities thus seemed relatively egalitarian and built upon solidarity, an attribute that patriots wanted to develop in contemporary Switzerland. Moreover, the platforms protected the lake dwellers against outside dangers in the same way that Switzerland wanted to be an island of security in the middle of the disturbances in Europe. Last, the apparent durability, throughout prehistory, of “the lake-dwelling civilization,” which stretched the length and breadth of Switzerland, showed evidence of a fundamental antiquity of a community only superficially affected by Roman occupation, and then by its partition into Romano-Burgunds and Alamanni tribes.

Regardless of its scientific value, Keller’s theory thus had real mythic value. It was a myth that inspired many painters, poets, and writers and spread very deeply throughout the population thanks to historical processions, popular works, images on calendars, and the like. However, not only did the discovery of the lake dwellers have significance for Swiss history, it also had significance for the history of world archaeological research.

These villages, with their evidences of everyday life and being preserved in an almost perfect state, fulfilled the public’s romantic expectations of the past. The villages reduced the humanist scholars, for whom prehistoric vestiges were not meaningful, to silence: a stone axe with its sleeve and handle shows evidence of its function by itself, which actually made the drawing of ethnological parallels easier. Moreover,