Life on stilts: The Lake Dwelling Museum on Lake Constance

On March 12, 1922 a group of 60 prehistory enthusiasts founded the Society of Lake Dwelling Archeology and Regional Ethnology. That same year, with the help of experts from the Research Institute for Prehistory in Tübingen, they began a reconstruction of two pole houses from the Federseemoor marshes in Upper Swabia.

The two first constructions still stand today, after almost 100 years of exposure to the elements. In the winter, when the water level in the lake is lower, the piles are exposed and routinely treated and repaired. After 15 to 20 years, the wooden poles are replaced - just as they probably were in the Stone Age.

What began with two pole houses has become a sizable museum: six small villages with 23 reconstructed houses from the Stone and Bronze Age, dating back to about 4,000 to 850 B.C.

In 2002, the museum set up dioramas with lifesize models showing scenes from the dwellers' everyday lives, including a possible death ritual, and a scene that shows what everyday life might have been like for Stone Age man.

Stone Age Man Uhldi is another attraction at the lakeside museum. He shows young and old how hard life was back then and demonstrates the skills needed to light a fire with the help of pyrite and tinder polypore. He also shows how people made razor-sharp flint blades, tools and pots.

No electricity, no running water for eight weeks: two families with a total of six kids embarked on this adventure in the summer of 2006 for a TV documentary on life in the Stone Age. They lived in a pole house village a bit removed from Lake Constance, just like people did 5,000 years ago. The structures were moved to the museum in 2007.

In 2011, UNESCO put the remains of prehistoric pile-dwelling settlements in and around the Alps - 111 small individual sites in six Alpine nations, including the site at Unteruhldingen - on its World Heritage list. The structures give valuable insight into life in prehistoric times during the Neolithic and Bronze Age.

A good place to start a tour of the Lake Dwellings Museum is the state-of-the-art multimedia show "Archaeorama." The film gives visitors a 360-degree underwater panoramic view of the stilts that support the houses, and explains the intricacies of underwater archeology.