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Yes / Lakeshore and wetland settlements of the Circum-Alpine region are well known for their excellent preservation of organic remains and their potential for accurate dating through dendrochronology. This settlement tradition spans from the Neolithic to the Early Iron Age, though several hiatuses in lake-dwelling construction are observed. Traditional models for the abandonment of lake settlements rely upon climatically deterministic models, linking declining climatic conditions to increasing lake-levels, which would have impacted upon settlements and forced the inhabitants to relocate. Recent studies of Neolithic lake-dwellings have indicated that social factors also influenced the development of these settlements, while the ‘social biography’ of settlements has been an area of increasing interest in terrestrial settlements. A review of selected Late Bronze Age (LBA) lake settlement illustrates the development sequence seen at many lake-dwellings from across the Circum-Alpine region. The proposal of a biographical model linking cultural influences to the development sequence observed in LBA lake-dwellings, and to the choice to abandon areas and relocate villages, offers further insights into the development of enigmatic settlements. / Swiss National Science Foundation

No / After more than 3500 years of occupation in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, the many lake-dwellings’ around the Circum-Alpine region ‘suddenly’ came to an end. Throughout that period alternating phases of occupation and abandonment illustrate how resilient lacustrine populations were against change: cultural/environmental factors might have forced them to relocate temporarily, but they always returned to the lakes. So why were the lake-dwellings finally abandoned and what exactly happened towards the end of the Late Bronze Age that made the lake-dwellers change their way of life so drastically? The new research presented here draws upon the results of a four-year-long project dedicated to shedding light on this intriguing conundrum. Placing a particular emphasis upon the Bronze Age, a multidisciplinary team of researchers has studied the lake-dwelling phenomenon inside out, leaving no stones unturned, enabling identification of all possible interactive socio-economic and environmental factors that can be subsequently tested against each other to prove (or disprove) their validity. By re-fitting the various pieces of the jigsaw a plausible, but also rather unexpected, picture emerges.