The archaeologist Deborah Sabo, in Mythlore, calls the description of Lake-town as Bilbo arrives there as perhaps Tolkien's most vivid attempt to model a place in Middle-earth on real-world archaeology. She notes that pile dwellings were discovered at Lake Zurich in 1853-1854 when the water level was unusually low; Ferdinand Keller proposed that the village had been constructed on a platform on piles over the lake, creating a sensation. By 1900, some hundreds of lake villages had been identified from Britain and Europe, and in a lake-dwelling craze, children's books and newspaper and magazine articles provided pictures and descriptions of lake villages. In addition, Sabo writes that Tolkien characteristically viewed the past as greater and more glorious than the present, and that after Smaug has fallen, dying, on the town, destroying it, people avoid the place: few dared to cross the cursed spot, and none dared to dive into the shivering water or recover the precious stones that fell from his rotting carcase. She states that in this passage, Tolkien is projecting the tale into the future, when the new town too will be an archaeological site, complete with folklore beliefs about a haunted place containing bones, jewels, and the remains of the piles of the town.