How did Stone Age man live thousands of years ago? The Lake Dwelling Museum in Unteruhldingen, on the German shores of Lake Constance, features painstakingly reconstructed small villages towering on wooden stilts.
Image: DW/B. Baumann
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Life on stilts: The Lake Dwelling Museum on Lake Constance
How did Stone Age man live many thousands of years ago? The Lake Dwelling Museum in Unteruhldingen on the German shores of Lake Constance has painstakingly reconstructed small villages towering on wooden poles.
Image: Pfahlbaumuseum
The way things were
On March 12, 1922 a group of 60 prehistory enthusiasts founded the Society of Lake Dwelling Archeology and Regional Ethnology. That same year, with the help of experts from the Research Institute for Prehistory in Tübingen, they began a reconstruction of two pole houses from the Federseemoor marshes in Upper Swabia.
Image: Pfahlbaumuseum
Life on the water
The two first constructions still stand today, after almost 100 years of exposure to the elements. In the winter, when the water level in the lake is lower, the piles are exposed and routinely treated and repaired. After 15 to 20 years, the wooden poles are replaced - just as they probably were in the Stone Age.
Image: DW/B. Baumann
Adding on
What began with two pole houses has become a sizable museum: six small villages with 23 reconstructed houses from the Stone and Bronze Age, dating back to about 4,000 to 850 B.C.
Image: Pfahlbaumuseum
Stone Age scenes
In 2002, the museum set up dioramas with lifesize models showing scenes from the dwellers' everyday lives, including a possible death ritual, and a scene that shows what everyday life might have been like for Stone Age man.
Image: Pfahlbaumuseum
Stone Age skills
Stone Age Man Uhldi is another attraction at the lakeside museum. He shows young and old how hard life was back then and demonstrates the skills needed to light a fire with the help of pyrite and tinder polypore. He also shows how people made razor-sharp flint blades, tools and pots.
Image: Pfahlbaumuseum
Experiencing the struggle
No electricity, no running water for eight weeks: two families with a total of six kids embarked on this adventure in the summer of 2006 for a TV documentary on life in the Stone Age. They lived in a pole house village a bit removed from Lake Constance, just like people did 5,000 years ago. The structures were moved to the museum in 2007.
Image: Pfahlbaumuseum
UN recognition
In 2011, UNESCO put the remains of prehistoric pile-dwelling settlements in and around the Alps - 111 small individual sites in six Alpine nations, including the site at Unteruhldingen - on its World Heritage list. The structures give valuable insight into life in prehistoric times during the Neolithic and Bronze Age.
Image: DW/B. Baumann
Multimedia meets Stone Age
A good place to start a tour of the Lake Dwellings Museum is the state-of-the-art multimedia show "Archaeorama." The film gives visitors a 360-degree underwater panoramic view of the stilts that support the houses, and explains the intricacies of underwater archeology.
Image: Pfahlbaumuseum
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Visitors to the Lake Dwelling Museum in Unteruhldingen start their tour with a multimedia show that takes them deep into Lake Constance. Two divers appear on a huge screen, beckoning the rapt audience to come along and examine the wooden stilts not from above, but underwater.
Back out in the open, a view of the actual houses built on the reconstructed Stone and Bronze Age stilts comes as a surprise. Who lived here, why did they choose this site, why did they build on poles? What do we know about their daily lives, rituals and religion?
The above pictures give you a small glimpse of a visit to the Lake Dwelling Museum - which holds the answers to all the questions.
