![\"Camille](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/W2WE7IVX7F5K4QPAOXCMS3DXIU.jpg\")
Camille Colonna is in charge of operations at the dig. Nicolas Garriga\/AP Photo\/Nicolas Garriga<\/p>\nBut in a city this old, the soil cannot be turned until what lies beneath it is excavated, in case it is damaged during the work.<\/p>\n
So a slice of Notre Dame\u2019s forecourt has become an excavation site \u2014 an open pit ringed by barriers and crossed by a wooden walkway, a few steps from the lineup.<\/p>\n
French media have dubbed it the \u201cdig of the century.\u201d<\/p>\n
Get Love Letters: The Newsletter<\/p>\n
A weekly dispatch with all the best relationship content and commentary \u2013 plus exclusive content for fans of Love Letters, Dinner With Cupid, weddings, therapy talk, and more.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a rare opportunity for us to work on something that\u2019s tangibly going to make a difference to the history of Paris,\u201d Lucie Altenburg, a conservator with the Paris archeology unit, said in an interview.<\/p>\n
Camille Colonna is in charge of operations at the dig. Nicolas Garriga\/AP Photo\/Nicolas Garriga<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 like a modern Da Vinci Code.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt makes Notre Dame feel alive again,\u201d said Emily Carter, 34, a tourist from Manchester waiting in line with her two children. \u201cYou come to see the cathedral, then realize there\u2019s another city under your feet. That\u2019s almost more moving.\u201d<\/p>\n
The first traces appear 20 inches down; 13 feet lower, the team is still pulling up the past. Some days they fill 15 crates \u2014 from ground that has lain untouched for decades.<\/p>\n
This is the bargain in every old city: The past is not in a museum down the street \u2014 it is under the street.<\/p>\n
Cities rise. Each age builds on the rubble of the last, and the ground climbs with it; in Rome, it has risen about 30 feet since the empire fell in the fifth century AD.<\/p>\n
![\"Archeologist](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/XHZORM6SIOZHVOHLCYRY5J7E6A.jpg\")
Archeologist Lucie Altenburg showed a drawer containing artifacts uncovered during excavations.Nicolas Garriga\/AP Photo\/Nicolas Garriga<\/p>\n
When Athens built its metro for the 2004 Olympics, it set off the largest excavation in Greek history and turned up tens of thousands of objects, now shown in the stations themselves. Paris is no different.<\/p>\n
It all comes from the island in the Seine, the Ile de la Cite, where Paris began.<\/p>\n
Centuries later, Notre Dame rose on the same ground.<\/p>\n
At the cathedral\u2019s birth in 1163, the entire square was packed with medieval houses, split by a single street, said Camille Colonna, the archeologist leading the dig.<\/p>\n
Digging down, her team has reached their cellars \u2014 and therefore also the time in history they represent.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Twenty centuries are stacked in 13 feet of earth \u2014 or about the height of two-and-a-half Napoleon Bonapartes standing on top of one another.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere you can see the layers \u2014 medieval Paris, Roman Paris, maybe even before that,\u201d said Yasmine Benali, 22, an archeology student watching from behind the barriers. \u201cIt makes the city feel less like a postcard and more like something still being discovered.\u201d<\/p>\n
The richest finds here come from the foulest place: the deep pits beneath the medieval houses, old latrines that doubled as rubbish dumps.<\/p>\n
Out of them the team keeps lifting whole jugs and cups \u2014 thrown away centuries ago, yet still intact \u2014 among the broken plates and animal bones.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s \u201crare to find complete ceramics,\u201d said Valentine Breloux, an archeologist with the unit.<\/p>\n
Here the soft waste cushioned them, and centuries later they miraculously came up whole.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 the same mysterious markings on shard after shard.<\/p>\n
What they mean has yet to be deciphered.<\/p>\n
Of everything she has cleaned from Notre Dame, Breloux said, these are the most \u201castonishing.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Roman finds are the ones the archeologists value most \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Colonna\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Every find leaves the pit and travels north, to the city\u2019s archeology center \u2014 what Colonna calls \u201ca huge archeological store,\u201d a treasure house of Paris.<\/p>\n
For archeologists, the cathedral dig is a rare treat. In France, like elsewhere, they work only where building work is about to begin \u2014 a bit like how industrial quarry workers end up unearthing dinosaur remains.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 part of how Paris is bracing for ever hotter summers induced by global warming.<\/p>\n
The tourists who now wait in the bare sun beneath the gargoyles will, in a few summers, line up in the shade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But in a city this old, the soil cannot be turned until what lies beneath it is excavated,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[21359,83,315,30,1265,3219,90],"class_list":["post-30400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-paris","tag-archaeology-and-anthropology","tag-general-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-paris","tag-religion","tag-science","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}