The remains of an ancient Gallic stone and wood wall have been discovered beneath a the 19th century Hôtel-Dieu hospital on the Île de la Cité, the island in the Seine River that is in the heart of the modern city of Paris. Île de la Cité has long been hypothesized to have been the site of Lutetia, the first Gallic oppidum that would become Paris. Before this discovery, no traces of a pre-Roman settlement had been found on the island, and scholars have debated other possible locations as the original Lutetia.
The 65-foot section of wall was discovered in an archaeological survey during construction work in the courtyard of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital. The wall is made of stone blocks with horizontal wooden beams, a technique typical of fortifications of late Iron Age Gallic oppida. Behind the wall was a platform created with piled sand and gravel almost seven feet thick. Archaeologists found a Gallic spearhead and a coin at the base of the platform.
Traces of severe burning were discovered on the wall cladding. There were also charred seeds found near the wall, and the remains of a burned wooden structure right in front of it. Carbon-14 testing of the charred wooden elements date them to between 200 B.C. and 10 B.C., a range which comfortably includes 52 B.C., the year when according to Julius Caesar, the Gallic Parisii tribe set fire to their oppidum to keep it out of the hands of the invading Romans.
The first written account of Lutetia is in the seventh commentary of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War, and it is bare bones: “This is a stronghold of the Parisii, situated on an island in the River Seine.” Caesar describes how while he took his legions to fight the Aedui and rescue his supplies by fording the Loire River, his lieutenant Titus Labienus took four legions to Lutetia. When they heard how he’d defeated Senones in Metiosedum by making a bridge out of ships, the Parisii burned Lutetia and broke up its bridges before he arrived.
There are several islands in the Seine, so this description didn’t really narrow down the location of the original Gallic settlement that would become Paris, and while Île de la Cité was a likely candidate, other possibilities caught scholars’ eyes, most recently the Parisian suburb of Nanterre at a bend in the Seine where a large Gallo-Roman necropolis was excavated between 1994 and 2005.
After the Roman conquest, Lutetia regrew mostly on the Left Bank of the Seine where some of the most ancient finds in Parisian history have been made. After the town was sacked by Germanic tribespeople in the late 3rd century, Île de la Cité was fortified and became a bulwark of defense against invasion. The Roman governor lived there in the 4th century. The first Frankish king, Clovis I, established his capital in Paris in 508 A.D., and built his palace on Île de la Cité.
The first hospital was built on the island in 651 A.D., so while the current Hôtel-Dieu building was completed in 1877, it has ancient antecedents, but nobody expected to find a structure 800 years older than the first hospital under its courtyard.
Because of the exceptional significance of the find, excavations will continue to unearth the entire complex of structures that remain. Archaeologists will study the wall to establish its purpose, the construction date, the circumstances of the destructive fire and what the connection between the wall and the sand and gravel platform behind it is.
The wall is not likely to be preserved in situ. It is deep below ground level and in an exceptionally fragile condition due to the fire. The plan is to make a mold of the wall so that it can be reconstructed after conservation in a museum. It will be thoroughly documented, scanned, photographed with thousands of HD pictures to create a digital photogrammetry composite.
* This article was originally published here
