A Neolithic Fishing Lodge at Cham-Eslen (Canton of Zug, Switzerland)?

The Neolithic site of Cham-Eslen at Lake Zug is a single house on a small island that lies below water level today. The isolated situation raises the question, if this site may have had a specific function. There are some quite particular features: more than 1000 fishing net weights of different shapes and sizes have been found. Due to the excellent preservation of textiles and their traces, many seemingly ordinary pebbles could be identified as net weights. However, no gillnets where preserved, two net fragments may have belonged to small cast or hand nets.

These finds correspond with a dominance of fish remains (n=3.675) compared to other animals. Nevertheless, the high proportion of wild animals like red deer, wild boar and squirrel also point to the fact that in addition to fishing, hunting was equally important. Looking at the different fish species like pike, perch, various cyprinids, whitefish and trout we assume that fishing took place hardly in the open water but almost exclusively close to the lakeshore. We also observed a surprisingly high amount of dental and palati­nal fragments among the pike bones. This may result from different taphonomic biases affecting the archaeozoological record. However, we rather interpret them as remains of a specific processing method related to conserving (smoking?) the pikes on site.

Furthermore the preliminary archaeobotanical analysis stresses that remnants of cultivated plants and especially remains of threshing and crop weeds are quite rare. So, the site could represent a specialized fishing lodge - maybe used only temporarily. Two (or three?) log boats and an accumulation of burnt clay and fish remains of a possible smoker could be interpreted as further evidences in favor of this hypothesis.

The specific functional traits of the site corroborate a new model for Neolithic wetland sites (cf. oral presentation by Brigitte Röder and Eda Gross), expecting rather complex large-scale organized and diversified site patterns with shared site-catchments, instead of the traditional model with clusters of small independent units (villages).