elanya

The rest of Canada knows and cares who Jacques Cartier is, I'm sure! As interesting as I find this news, I found about it through a historical archaeology listserv. The guy who posted it gave two links. One was to the subscribers only Montreal gazette, and the other was to the French CBC site.

The gist of things is that while looking for evidence of a Champlain occupation of Quebec city, they found some Italian glass that dates back to the Cartier expeditions, from the 1540's. They believe it marks the presence of a fort (plausible). The 400th's anniversary of the founding of Quebec is coming up in 2008, and so the provincial government is pouring huge piles of cash into the site in order to develop it as a heritage site and be open by that date. Must be a good time to be an archaeologist in Quebec :o They actually found this all last fall, but this is the first I've heard about it.... If my French is not completely shit, they were sitting on the news until they could confirm the dates via radio carbon dating.

This find excites me, but the fact that the news has yet to trickle out to English Canada is kind of disappointing. Google gives me nothin' :/