An Alpine Pompeii from the Stone Age

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An Alpine Pompeii from the Stone Age

By Matthias Schulz

What happened to the prehistoric village on Lake Mondsee in the Austrian Alps? One geologist has found evidence that a vast rock slide may have set off a tsunami that buried the lakeside settlement. He's hoping to find funding -- and mummies.

The fall of Pompeii began with a small cloud of smoke drifting out of Mt. Vesuvius. Within a few days, though, the affluent Roman city lay coated in a meter-thick shroud of ash. Even more devastating were the effects of a giant meteorite that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, bringing an end to the age of the dinosaurs.

Such violent events, putting human beings and animals at the mercy of destructive natural forces, have always stimulated the fantasies of those born afterwards. In some cases, however, the truth has been less dramatic. The notion that the Mayans starved to death because of failed harvests and that the palaces of the Minoans were destroyed by dramatic floods is just as untrue as the claim that murderers smashed a hole into the head of Tutankhamun.

Now scientists are examining a new catastrophic scenario. Could it be that a severe rockslide in the Alps destroyed a prehistoric village? Alexander Binsteiner, a geologist and flint stone expert, has proposed the thesis. He believes that the accident affected lake dwellers living on the eastern tip of Mondsee Lake, near present-day Salzburg. Twenty to 50 wooden huts, coated with mud or cow dung, stood there on stilts along the lakefront. The women wore dresses made of flax, decorated with shells and snails, and the men wore bast fiber ponchos and sandals. It was considered cool to chew on birch tar, the prehistoric version of chewing gum.

Shimmering Red Weapons of Metal

Similar lakeside settlements were common in the fourth millennium B.C. These collections of slightly elevated huts on moist ground were scattered around the Alps, from Lake Paladru in France, across the lakes of Switzerland and Austria to Slovenia and Lake Garda in present-day Italy.

The people of the Mondsee Lake settlement were apparently relatively advanced within this cultural group. They had metallurgical skills, which were rare in Europe. They cleverly searched the mountains for copper deposits, melted the crude ore in clay ovens and made refined, shimmering red weapons out of the metal.

Full story, source: Der Spiegel