Discovery The site of La Tène was discovered in 1857 during a period dubbed the "lake dwelling fever" (in
French:
"fièvre lacustre"). Pile-dwellings were found on the banks of many Swiss lakes, most of the time with the collaboration of scientists and fishermen. In November 1857, fisherman Hans Kopp was sailing to a Neolithic dwelling near
Concise from
Lake Biel under orders from Colonel Friedrich Schwab when he spotted an interesting spot near
La Tène. He stopped and started investigating, and within an hour he had found around forty iron objects, among which were eight
spearheads and twelve
swords. At that time, that is before the
Jura water correction, the lake level was 2.7 m higher, and therefore, the site was 60 to 70 cm underwater. The discoveries made by Kopp went into Friedrich Schwab's private collection until his death, when they were given to the city of
Biel/Bienne. The first scholars studying the site, Colonel Friedrich Schwab and
Ferdinand Keller, did not consider the site of particular interest. However, when
Édouard Desor, professor of geology and paleontology, heard of the discoveries, around a year later, he immediately realised the potential of La Tène within the
Three-age system. In 1866, the first
International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology took place in Neuchâtel, Desor advocated the site of La Tène as the reference for the prehistoric
Iron Age. A few years later, during a later meeting of the congress in
Stockholm, it was decided to divide the Iron Age in Europe in two periods. The first was labelled
Hallstatt culture, from a site located in Austria. The second Iron Age (from around 450 BCE to
25 BCE) was named after the site of La Tène, and thus called the
La Tène culture.
Early excavations (1880s–1917) The site was quickly noted for the quality of the artifacts that were found. After Desor and Schwab, La Tène attracted other archaeology amateurs like Alexis Dardel-Thorens and Victor Gross. It also attracted many looters. Around
1870, the first
Jura water correction brought the lake level 2.7 m lower, and the site which was believed to be exhausted proved to have more to be found. With the lowered water, the site's topography became much easier to understand; this led to the discovery of the remains of two bridges over an old branch of the
Thielle river as well as buildings of an undetermined function. During the 1880s, while excavations were conducted by Emile Vouga, the organisation of the site was clarified but the interpretation remained unclear. In 1907, on an initiative of the History and Archaeology society of Neuchâtel with a support from the Canton of Neuchâtel, a well organized excavation started. The excavation, led by William Wavre and then Paul Vouga (1909), consisted in systematically emptying the old river Thielle bed. This methodical excavation lasted until 1917 and brought to light a large corpus of remarkably culturally similar artifacts. Six years later, Vouga published a monograph in the form of a typological inventory of the excavation discoveries where he did not try to suggest an interpretation of the site's function. The publication was considered disappointing, because Vouga did not use techniques that were already known at the time, such as studying the site's
stratigraphy. However, Vouga's monograph remains useful for the chronotypological studies of the
second Iron Age. A new project led by professor
Gilbert Kaenel was launched in 2007, with the support of the
Swiss National Science Foundation, the
University of Neuchâtel and the Neuchâtel Department of Cultural Heritage and Archaeology (''Office du Patrimoine et de l'Archéologie, OPAN''). The project aimed to establish an inventory of the
artifacts and
archives concerning the site, to confront them to the results of the 2003 excavation and to stimulate cooperation between the museums in possession of the La Tène discoveries as well as encouraging works about certains categories of artifacts. The project has led to the publications of the La Tène collections from the
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire of Geneva, the
Bern Historical Museum and the
British Museum in
London based on a model establish by Thierry Lejars for the Schwab museum in
Biel/Bienne. == Discoveries ==