La Draga was discovered in 1990 on the eastern shore of the Lake of Banyoles, a karstic lake sitting at 170 meters above sea level. In the last quarter of the 6th millennium BCE, this spot was a gentle peninsula sloping into the water, and a farming community built its homes here. What sets the site apart is chemistry as much as history. Below the water table, oxygen could not reach the buried remains, so organic material that would normally rot away was preserved intact: bones, worked wood, fibers, textiles, seeds, leaves, even mushrooms. On the dry, terrestrial part of the site, only bone and ceramics survived. The lake, in effect, kept a copy of daily life that no ordinary excavation could ever recover.

Among the wooden objects pulled from the mud were bows, believed to be the oldest Neolithic bows found anywhere in Europe. They were made of yew, the same dense, springy wood prized for archery for millennia afterward, while the arrow shafts were cut from willow. The villagers were remarkably deliberate about their materials. Boxwood became combs, needles, sickles, and digging sticks; deciduous oak was shaped into containers and shovels; tool handles were made from whichever wood best suited the task. Their pottery and ornaments belong to the Cardial tradition of the western Mediterranean, linking this lakeshore to communities in southern France and along the coast. These were not crude beginnings but a mature, well-organized craft culture, working wood with a real understanding of its grain and strength.

The houses can be reconstructed from the postholes and timbers left behind. They were quadrangular rather than round, some built from elements up to 5 meters long and 3 meters high, and they were held together less by joinery than by lashing, with ropes and ties doing the structural work. Carpentry was one of the community's main activities, judged by both the volume of wood worked and the quality of the results. In a later phase of occupation, the builders changed their approach, burying the old wooden structures under pavements of large travertine slabs on which daily tasks were carried out. Hearths from this period are numerous and quickly used up, scattered with animal bones, cereals, mussel shells, and cooking stones, as if life happened more outdoors than in.

The waterlogged ground preserved the largest collection of Neolithic seeds and fruits ever found on the Iberian Peninsula, roughly 400,000 remains, and they tell the story of a people learning to farm. The inhabitants of La Draga were among the first to practice agriculture in the northeast of the peninsula, tilling small permanent fields by hand with wooden digging sticks. Their main crops were durum wheat and two-row barley, staples of the early Mediterranean farmer. A third crop is more surprising: the opium poppy, probably grown for the oil in its seeds, though its other properties were likely understood as well. Around the grain fields, the villagers still gathered the wild harvest of hazelnuts, blackberries, and acorns, one foot in cultivation and one in the older world of foraging.

The finds reach into crafts rarely preserved from so deep in prehistory. Ropes, cords, and baskets survived, woven from plant fibers such as clematis, rushes, and hemp, alongside combs, needles, and spindles used to spin and weave, hinting at textiles made from nettle fiber and from sheep or goat hair. The community's diet was broad and mostly domestic. Pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats supplied most of the meat, supplemented by hunted deer, wild boar, and birds, and by fish and molluscs from both the lake and the sea. Wooden bowls, ladles, spatulas, a bone spoon, and a tortoise shell show a household fully equipped for cooking. Seven thousand years on, La Draga lets us watch a single village eat, build, hunt, and weave, in extraordinary and intimate detail.