1860s Discoveries at Peschiera Reveal Ancient Lake Civilization

They were dredging the canal for the construction of the “Marine Arsenal” when the engineers of the asburgic Navy Corps of Engineers retrieved numerous bronze artifacts from the sandy bottom: an extraordinary discovery, well understood by those men who began to note observations on these objects, which they sketched in their notebooks.

Findings and Initial Hypotheses

It was 1860, but as early as 1830, reports had been made of fragments of terracotta and remains of pilings found near the shoreline on the opposite side of the harbor entrance; and in 1861, artifacts made of bronze were discovered in a body of water where remains of an extensive sunken pile-driving site had been found.

On February 18, 1862, Lieutenant Heinrich von Silber wrote to the Swiss archaeologist Ferdinand Keller that the abundance of recovered artifacts led him first to consider a sunken merchant ship and later to the existence of a stilt village: a theory reinforced by the presence of numerous posts driven into the seabed.

Archaeological Investigations and Discoveries

The subsequent studies, starting from those of Eduard Von Sacken, a member of the Imperial Cabinet of Antiquities, would lead to the identification of a still-unknown civilization that had operated at Peschiera: a history that dates the first settlement to between 1500 and 1100 BC.

An ancient yet advanced community, capable of a unique metallurgical production, laying the foundation for a kind of cultural assertion compared to other lake and river centers.