Photo: AP Photo/Nicolas Garriga.
A restoration project at Notre Dame Cathedral is uncovering evidence of daily life from centuries of Parisian history.
Today’s story is about the city of Paris deciding to put a shaded plaza in front of Notre Dame Cathedral. It’s also about the need to first uncover any artifacts that may be buried in the space, and right now a dig is focused on Roman artifacts.
(I must say, when I read phrases like, “as the Roman empire collapsed,” I wonder if the Romans refused to believe that collapse could ever happen. Maybe there’s a lesson for us.)
Thomas Adamson writes at the Associated Press, “Wilting in the summer sun, a line of tourists waits to climb Notre Dame cathedral and meet its gargoyles.
“Four meters (13 feet) beneath them, a team of archaeologists is digging the other way — straight down and back in time, to Roman Paris 2,000 years ago.
“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 works.
“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 line-up.
“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. …
“This is the bargain in every old city: The past is not in a museum down the street — it is under the street. Cities rise. Each age builds on the rubble of the last, and the ground climbs with it; in Rome, it has risen about 9 meters (30 feet) since the empire fell in the fifth century AD. …
“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 4 meters (13 feet) of earth. …
“The richest finds here come from the foulest place: the deep pits beneath the medieval houses, old latrines that doubled as rubbish dumps. Out of them the team keeps lifting whole jugs and cups — thrown away centuries ago, yet still intact — among the broken plates and animal bones.
“It’s ‘rare to find complete ceramics,’ said Valentine Breloux, an archaeologist with the unit. Here the soft waste cushioned them. … Then some other objects came that confounded experts. As conservators cleaned what looked like ordinary medieval pottery, they found faint reddish writing painted on the inside — the same mysterious markings on shard after shard.
“What they mean has yet to be deciphered. Of everything she has cleaned from Notre Dame, Breloux said, these are the most ‘astonishing.’
“The coins came up as black discs, eaten by rust. But under an X-ray, a face returned: it was Constantine, the Roman emperor who ruled in the early 300s AD. Such objects also ‘can be invaluable in giving us the date of the (underground) layer,’ Altenburg said.
“The Roman finds are the ones the archaeologists value most — the deepest, oldest and least understood. In Roman times, the town was called Lutetia, and its center lay across the river, on the Left Bank.
“As the Roman empire collapsed, people pulled back to the Ile de la Cite, where Notre Dame would later rise, and fortified the island with walls of stone taken from earlier buildings.
“Colonna’s team found some proof: a Roman doorstep found in the dig, taken from a much bigger building, carried over, turned upside down, and laid in a road as paving. …
“For archaeologists, the cathedral dig is a rare treat. In France, like elsewhere, they work only where building work is about to begin — a bit like how industrial quarry workers end up unearthing dinosaur remains. …
“The new square should be mostly finished by 2028: a kind of woodland clearing, with 160 new trees and a thin film of water sliding over the stone to cool it in summer — part of how Paris is bracing for ever hotter summers induced by global warming. …
“Until then, the Notre Dame team wants to go deeper still — past the Romans, toward whoever came before them, the Gauls who gave the city its first name.”
More at AP, here.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 