PARIS (AP) — 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.AdvertisementAdvertisementBut 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.A modern Da Vinci CodeFrench 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.AdvertisementAdvertisement“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 realize there’s another city under your feet. That’s almost more moving.”The first traces appear 50 centimeters (20 inches) down; 4 meters (13 feet) lower, the team is still pulling up the past. Some days they fill 15 crates — from ground that has lain untouched for decades.Ancient cities have archaeologists monitoring digsThis 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.AdvertisementAdvertisementWhen 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.It all comes from the island in the Seine, the Ile de la Cite, where Paris began.Centuries later, Notre Dame rose on the same ground.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.AdvertisementAdvertisementBelow them lie Merovingian and Carolingian grain pits, from the sixth to the 10th centuries; b …
