On June 27, 2011, UNESCO declared the prehistoric pile dwellings in the Alpine regions World Heritage sites.
Altogether, the UNESCO selected 111 pile dwelling sites in six countries. Those countries are Slovenia, Italy, France Switzerland Austria, and Germany. The sites date back to 5000 to 500 BC and most of them belong to the Stone and Bronze Age. These submerged settlements found under water and in the wetlands are an invaluable, but also extremely endangered archive of man. Through the absence of air, the organic remains like textiles, wood and food stayed well preserved. Nowadays, with state of the art methods like dendrochronology or palaeoclimatology, it is possible to fundamentally reconstruct our history since the Stone Age. The unusually well preserved artifacts provide us a plausible view into the prehistoric living conditions, into a time during which there were no written records.