If you haven’t read a newspaper or watched television in the last couple of days, been offline, or don’t live in Canada, you may not have heard about the 18th-century skeletons being excavated at an old French fort in Cape Breton. The story has drawn media attention across the country.
A team from Parks Canada has been exhuming human remains from a large graveyard outside the gates of the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site.
So far, they have uncovered five sets of skeletal remains and artifacts.
According to a Canadian Press article, “Up to 1,100 residents of the French fort are buried at the site, which must be excavated because it is threatened by coastal erosion. Parks Canada has referred to the project as rescue archaeology.”
Testing will help determine the age, sex and health of each individual, data that will be given to Parks Canada for its interpretation and, hopefully, new insights into the fort’s history.
The fort was built in 1713 and abandoned in 1760 after decades of fighting between the French and British. It remains the largest of its kind in North America.
You can read the rest of the story in the Canadian Press article.
