From the remains found on the sites of these lacustrine villages, it is inferred that their occupiers were acquainted with agriculture, and grew wheat and barley; that they had domesticated animals, such as cats, dogs, pigs, oxen, horses, sheep, and goats; that they used as food, besides the flesh of domesticated and wild animals, fish, milk, corn-meal boiled or baked, hazel nuts, plums, apples, pears, sloes, blackberries, and raspberries; that they were acquainted with the principles of social government and the division of labour; and that they manufactured cloth and ropes from bast and flax by means of looms, and the distaff and spindle. Their clothing consisted of skins of animals sometimes prepared into leather, as well as cloth plaited or woven from flax. Of the kind of huts or buildings erected over the platforms, little is known owing to their complete decay from exposure to sun and rain. They appear to have been rectangular in shape, and formed of wattle or hurdle-work of small branches, woven between the upright piles, and plastered over with clay. Each had a hearth formed of two or three large slabs overlying a bed of clay. The earliest founders of these dwellings were, according to Keller, a branch of the Celtic population who came into Europe as a pastoral people, bringing with them, from the East, the most important domestic animals. The absence of winter corn and hemp, most of the culinary vegetables, as well as the domestic fowl, which was unknown to the Greeks till about the time of Pericles, points to the period of their occupancy as a long way antecedent to the Christian era. Dr. Keller, one of the ablest authorities on this subject, has come to the conclusion that they were simply villages inhabited by a peaceful community, that they attained their greatest development about B.C. 1500, and that they finally ceased to be occupied about the commencement of the Christian era.