Stone Age · 3842–3838 BC · Biel, Canton of Bern, Switzerland
Storm destroyed Neolithic lakeside village in Switzerland after less than five years
Tree rings from the timbers date the 23-house settlement at Biel to 3842–3838 BC, when a west windstorm and floods wrecked it.
Book
Biel, Switzerland A Neolithic village of 23 houses on the shore of Lake Biel in Switzerland stood for less than five years. A storm and floods destroyed it in the summer of 3838 BC, according to the Archaeological Service of the canton of Bern. The service has set out its results in a new book.
Archaeologists found the remains during a rescue excavation in 2018 and 2019. They were on the building site of the new campus of the Bern University of Applied Sciences, in the centre of Biel. The team worked down to a depth of about 4.5 metres. In the deep construction pit, they used heavy machinery to remove the archaeological layers one at a time.
Preservation was exceptional. The team recovered more than 1,300 driven posts from the houses and the village defences. They also recovered another 700 wooden elements. The excavation covered roughly two-thirds of the settlement's total area.
Tree rings date each house to within six months
The timber made very precise dating possible. The team used dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating. It matches the pattern of wide and narrow growth rings in a piece of wood against a reference sequence. This gives the year in which the tree was felled.
At Biel, it shows that the village was occupied from 3842 BC to 3838 BC. The construction of each building can be dated to within six months. This let the archaeologists follow how the village grew.
The village began with a single row of houses and then spread out on two flanks. In a later phase, the inhabitants drove wooden breakwaters out towards the lake. They probably did this to protect the houses.
The Archaeological Service says this makes Biel one of the oldest villages with a known plan. It is also the oldest settlement on the shores of Lake Biel that can be reconstructed in such detail.
A storm from the west wrecked the village
In the summer of 3838 BC, a strong windstorm from the west almost completely destroyed the village. The canton's archaeologists say it is rare to identify such a specific event in the archaeological record. It is also rare to attribute it so clearly.
Their reading rests on the position and angle of the surviving posts. These suggest that water and wind lifted several buildings off the ground and damaged them beyond repair. Most likely, waves and gusts acted together. One post from a building on the northern edge of the settlement snapped during the storm.
In the months that followed, the survivors tried to rebuild. Eventually they abandoned the site altogether.
The excavation also produced evidence of everyday life. The team documented how pottery vessels were made and used. They also recovered tools of stone, bone and deer antler.
Most of the village's supplies and products were local in character. Some goods and customs came from much further away. Analyses point to trade contacts or cultural influences from central Switzerland, the Rhône Valley, Provence, Alsace and the Paris Basin.
The researchers reconstructed the villagers' diet from bone remains, phytoliths and charred seeds. The diet appears to match the general pattern at other lakeside villages of the same period in the Three Lakes region. This region lies around the lakes of Biel, Neuchâtel and Murten.
Lakeside settlements of this kind are often called pile dwellings. They are known from several prehistoric periods. Fifty-six sites in Switzerland are part of the UNESCO World Heritage property Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps. Six of them are in the canton of Bern.
The Archaeological Service of the canton of Bern will present its book on the excavation in Biel on 23 April.
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