Such dwelling-pits of the Stone Age seem to have been distributed all over Europe. Burnt wall-plaster with impressions of interwoven twigs, has frequently been found near or in the pits, doubtless indicating hut-building. In Mecklenburg, where the dwelling-pits were first carefully examined by Liesch, they have a circular outline of ten to fifteen yards, and are five to six and a half feet deep. At the bottom of the pit lie burnt and blackened stones, hearthstones, charcoal, potsherds, broken bones of animals, and a few stone implements, the latter being mostly found in larger numbers in the vicinity of the dwellings. The same circular dwelling-pits of the Stone Age are found in France. Smaller hearth-pits were recently found in very large numbers in the Spessart, in Bavaria, with hundreds of stone hatchets and perforated axe-hammers, some of the former being very finely made of jadeite. [Sidenote: America before History] During the Neolithic Period dwellings were frequently made on heights, and it seems that even at that time they were to a certain extent walled round and fortified. Such settlements are numerous all over Southern and Central Germany, in Austria-Hungary, especially in the coast-country, and in Italy and France. Many of these stations belong purely to the Stone Age; indeed, the majority were inhabited already during the Stone Age, and furnish the typical Neolithic relics familiar from the foregoing. On the other hand, they continue to be inhabited even in the later metal periods, and in some cases right down to modern times. The rock near Clausen, in the Eisack valley, in the Tyrol, on which the large Säben monastery now stands, was a mediæval castle, and during the times of the Romans a fortified settlement called Sobona stood there; and when excavations were made in 1895, for adding new buildings to the monastery, a well-ground stone hatchet of the later Stone Age came to light. On many hills in Central Germany are found traces of the ancient presence of men who lived on them or assembled on them for sacrificial feasts; the earth is coloured black by charred remains and organic influences, and this “black earth on heights and hills” contains frequently, as we have said, the traces of Neolithic men. In Italy, many finds on such heights--for instance, those made on the small castle-hill near Imola--seem to exhibit that stage of the Stone Age that is missing in the terramare, and that precedes the beginning of the Metal Age of the terramare, but corresponds to it in every essential except in the possession of metal.