To the shoppers scrutinizing the racks of newly arrived spring lingerie on the ground floor of the Monoprix store on the busy Boulevard Sebastopol, there was little to suggest anything unusual.
As they lined up for baguettes, croissants and loaves at the boulangerie counter — also on the ground floor — most were blissfully unaware that a few meters below them archeologists were brushing away centuries of sand and dirt to reveal hundreds of skeletons in a series of mass graves.
“It’s rather a bizarre thought,” Pierre, a retired civil servant, said as he clutched his bread stick on Monday. “Still, there’s all sorts of odd things buried under Paris.”
Other people in the line at the nearby tills shrugged and carried on shopping uninterested in digging a little deeper into the story that had become le fait divers (miscellaneous news item) of the week.
At the last count the remains of at least 200 people have been uncovered under the shop floor, and experts believe there may be more, victims of a sudden and devastating disease or catastrophe.
The discovery was made when the store applied to convert part of its cellar for extra storage space.
Knowing that the building sat on the site of the Hopital de la Croix de la Reine, which dated back to the Middle Ages, managers called in archeologists to check for human remains.
Nobody expected them to find much; most of the bodies buried in the hospital grounds had been disinterred when the building was destroyed in the early 19th century. Their bones were moved to the Paris catacombs, the underground ossuaries that hold the remains of about 6 million people in caverns and tunnels.
However, as the archeological team dug a little deeper, they were astonished to find dozens and dozens of skeletons in what appeared to be a series of mass graves.
“We had expected to find a few human remains as we knew it was a former hospital cemetery, but nothing like as many as we have found. We’ve come across hospital cemeteries before, notably in Marseilles and Troyes, but it’s the first discovery of its kind in Paris,” said Solene Bonleu of France’s Institute of Preventative Archeological Research.
Eight mass graves have been found so far, seven of them containing between five and 20 individual human remains buried up to five deep within a 100m2 area. The eighth grave contained, at the last count, the remains of 150 bodies.
Isabelle Abadie who is leading the dig, said there was possibly another layer of bodies below those that had been uncovered.
“What is astonishing is that the bodies were not thrown in, but put there with care and in an organized way. The individuals — men, women and children — were placed head-to-toe, no doubt to save space,” she said. “It suggests there were a lot of sudden deaths, but we still have to find the cause of this sudden fatal event and whether it was an epidemic, fever, famine.”
The archeologists have two weeks to complete the dig and allow Monoprix to convert its cellars.
“Eventually all of the bones will be removed, but we only have two weeks to finish the work so we’re not allowing people down there,” Bonleu said.
Scientists are carbon dating the remains and are carrying out tests to establish how the people died.
The original Hopital de la Trinite was built on the site in 1202.
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