Withering in the summer sun, a line of tourists waits to climb the Notre Dame Cathedral to meet its gargoyles.
Four meters below thema team of archaeologists excavates in the opposite direction (down and back in time), to the Roman Paris from 2,000 years ago.
In 2019, a fire caused the Notre Dame spire to collapse before the entire world watched. The cathedral was rebuilt and reopened at the end of 2024, and now Paris wants to humanize the hot, bare square in front of it with trees and shade.
But in such an ancient city, the earth cannot be removed until it has been excavated underneath, in case it is damaged during the work.
So part of the Notre Dame esplanade has become an excavation area: an open pit surrounded by barriers and crossed by a wooden walkway, a few steps from the line.
A modern Da Vinci Code
The French press has dubbed it “the excavation of the century”.
“It is a rare opportunity to work on something that is going to make a tangible difference in the history of Paris,” said Lucie Altenburg, curator of the Paris archeology unit.
Among the hundreds of objects that have already been found: a 4th century coin stamped with the face of Emperor Constantine and fragments of medieval pottery painted on the inside with markings that no expert has yet been able to decipher, like a modern Da Vinci Code.
“It makes Notre Dame feel alive again,” said Emily Carter, a 34-year-old tourist from Manchester who was waiting in line with her two children. «You come to see the cathedral and you realize there’s another city under your feet. That’s almost more moving.»
The first traces appear 50 centimeters deep. Four meters below, the team continues to bring the past to light. Some days they fill 15 boxes, with soil that has remained untouched for decades.
Archaeologists supervise excavations in ancient cities This is the reality of every ancient city: the past is not in a museum around the corner, but under the street.
Each era builds on the rubble of the previous one and, with it, the ground rises. In Rome, has increased about 9 meters since the fall of the empire in the 5th century AD
When Athens built its subway for the 2004 Olympic Games, the largest excavation in Greek history was launched and tens of thousands of objects were found, which are now displayed in the stations themselves. Paris is no different.
Everything comes from the island of the Seine, the Île de la Cité, where Paris was founded.
Centuries later, Notre Dame stood on the same ground.
When the cathedral was built, in 1163the entire square was packed with medieval houses, separated by a single street, said Camille Colonna, the archaeologist leading the excavation.
By digging downwards, his team has reached their cellars and thus also the historical era they represent.
Below are Merovingian and Carolingian grain silos, from between the 6th and 10th centuries. Further down, in a darker and deeper area, there are a dense Roman neighborhood from the 4th and 5th centuries.
Twenty centuries of history are stacked on 4 meters of earth, or approximately the height of two and a half Napoleons Bonaparte standing on top of each other.
“Here you can see the layers: medieval Paris, Roman Paris, maybe even before,” said Yasmine Benali, a 22-year-old archeology student watching from behind the barriers. “It makes the city feel less like a postcard and more like something you’re still discovering.”
Coins, pottery and mysterious marks
The most valuable finds here come from the most nauseating place: the deep wells under medieval houses, old latrines that also served as garbage dumps.
From there the team continues to remove whole jugs and cups (thrown away centuries ago, but intact) among broken plates and animal bones.
“It is rare to find complete ceramics,” said Valentine Breloux, archaeologist at the unit.
Here, soft debris cushioned them and, centuries later, they miraculously emerged whole.
Then other objects appeared that baffled the experts. As conservators cleaned what looked like ordinary medieval pottery, they found faint reddish writing painted on the inside—the same mysterious markings on fragment after fragment.
Its meaning is still to be deciphered.
Of everything he has cleaned at Notre Dame, these are the most “amazing” finds, Breloux said.
Coins can help date layers
The coins appeared as black disks, corroded by rust. But under the X-rays a face emerged: it was Constantine, the Roman emperor who ruled in the early 4th century AD
These types of objects “can also be invaluable in giving us the date of the (underground) layer,” said Altenburg.
Roman finds are the most valued by archaeologists: the deepest, the oldest and the least understood. In Roman times, the city was called Lutetia, and its center was on the other side of the river, on the left bank.
As the empire collapsed, the population retreated to the Île de la Cité, where Notre Dame would later stand, and fortified the island with stone walls taken from earlier buildings.
Colonna’s team found proof: a Roman threshold found in the excavation, taken from a much larger building, moved, turned upside down, and placed on a path as pavement.
Thousands of finds in archeology center
Each find leaves the pit and travels north to the city’s archeology center, what Colonna describes as “a huge archaeological warehouse,” a treasure chest of Paris.
For archaeologists, the excavation of the cathedral is an exceptional gift. In France, as in other places, they work only where a work is about to begin, something similar to how industrial quarry workers ended up unearthing dinosaur remains.
“This is only happening because the city of Paris decided they wanted to beautify the area,” Altenburg explained.
The new square should be mostly finished by 2028: a sort of tree-lined glade, with 160 new trees and a thin sheet of water sliding over the stone to cool it in the summer (part of the French capital’s plan to prepare for increasingly hot summers caused by global warming).
The tourists who now wait under the relentless sun, under the gargoyles, in a few summers will line up in the shade.
The former underground parking lot will reopen as a visitor center overlooking the Seine.
Until then, the Notre Dame team wants to delve even deeper, beyond the Romans, to those who came before them: the Gauls who gave the city its first name.
“The hope is that we can go back in time even further than we have ever achieved before,” Altenburg said.
AP Agency.
GML
