A team of archaeologists is taking part in the “dig of the century” beneath Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Source: NCR Online.
In 2019, fire brought Notre Dame’s spire crashing down as the world watched. The cathedral was rebuilt and reopened in late 2024, and now Paris wants to soften the hot, bare square in front of it with trees and shade.
But in a city this old, the soil cannot be turned until what lies beneath it is excavated, in case it is damaged during work.
So a slice of Notre Dame’s forecourt has become an excavation site –an open pit ringed by barriers and crossed by a wooden walkway, a few steps from the lineup.
French media have dubbed it the “dig of the century”.
“It’s a rare opportunity for us to work on something that’s tangibly going to make a difference to the history of Paris,” Lucie Altenburg, a conservator with the Paris archaeology unit, told The Associated Press.
Among the hundreds of objects already found: a fourth-century coin stamped with the face of the Emperor Constantine, and shards of medieval pottery painted on the inside with marks no expert has yet deciphered – like a modern Da Vinci Code.
“It makes Notre Dame feel alive again,” said Emily Carter, 34, a tourist from Manchester waiting in line with her two children. “You come to see the cathedral, then realise there’s another city under your feet. That’s almost more moving.”
The first traces appear 50 centimetres down; four metres lower, the team is still pulling up the past. Some days they fill 15 crates –from ground that has lain untouched for decades.
At the cathedral’s birth in 1163, the entire square was packed with medieval houses, split by a single street, said Camille Colonna, the archaeologist leading the dig.
Digging down, her team has reached their cellars – and therefore also the time in history they represent.
Below them lie Merovingian and Carolingian grain pits, from the sixth to the 10th centuries; below those, darker and deeper still, a dense Roman quarter from the fourth and fifth centuries.
Twenty centuries are stacked in four metres of earth – or about the height of two-and-a-half Napoleon Bonapartes standing on top of one another.
“Here you can see the layers – medieval Paris, Roman Paris, maybe even before that,” said Yasmine Benali, 22, an archaeology student watching from behind the barriers. “It makes the city feel less like a postcard and more like something still being discovered.”
FULL STORY
Under Notre Dame cathedral, a ‘dig of the century’ unearths 1,700 years of history (By Thomas Adamson and Jeffrey Schaeffer, NCR Online)
