The Ig pile dwellings, the houses on stilts the marshes keep

Visiting the pile dwellings at Morostig

The visit is made at Morostig, Ig’s house of nature and pile dwellings, with an exhibition on the marshes and a 1.5 km trail without shade to a reconstructed village of five huts and a logboat, which you can only enter with a guide. Admission is €12. The original finds are in the National Museum of Slovenia and the City Museum in Ljubljana, where the wheel is displayed. For the landscape around them, see the Ljubljana Marshes and UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Slovenia.

What the pile dwellings were

A pile dwelling is a house raised on stilts, a way of adapting to ground that water covers permanently or from time to time. Around the lakes and wetlands of the Alps there were many such villages between 5000 and 500 BC. In the Ljubljana Marshes more than 40 have been found, across over 150 km², lived in between 4600 and 1500 BC, from the late Stone Age through the Copper Age to the Bronze Age, when a large lake lay here.

The discovery of 1875

In 1875, while the Resnikov graben, a roadside ditch north of Ig, was being deepened, wooden posts, pottery and bones came to light. The Carniolan Provincial Museum, run by Karel Dežman, was told, and excavations began. In 1876 they produced the idol of the Ljubljana Marshes, a human-shaped vessel about 6,000 years old. And the same marshes yielded the oldest wheel with an axle yet found, around 5,200 years old.

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What the finds tell us

Thanks to the water, archaeologists can read a great deal into what remains. Seeds reveal which crops the pile dwellers grew, fibres show which plants they used for clothing, and the posts tell what their houses were like. The finds at Ig prove they worked metal, grew crops and kept domestic animals, and Roman and medieval traces have turned up in the marshes too.

World Heritage since 2011

In 2011, 111 pile-dwelling sites in six countries, Switzerland, Slovenia, Italy, France, Germany and Austria, were inscribed as the «Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps». Two groups lie near Ig, and in 2014 they were also declared a cultural monument of national importance. Constant contact with water has preserved wood, textiles, seeds and bones, which is why the park works to keep the groundwater level high.

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