Montreal museum confirms location of city’s first European settlement
MONTREAL — After years of research, officials at Montreal’s archaeology and history museum say they’re now able to pinpoint the precise location of the city’s first European settlement.
Although archaeologists have been digging the Fort Ville-Marie site for years, a recent discovery has allowed them to confirm the exact dimensions of the structure that housed the city’s early French settlers.
“For the first time we know what it looked like in the mid-17th century, what it was made of, and where the site of the future pavilion was inside the fort,” said Louise Pothier, an archaeologist at the Pointe-a-Calliere museum.
Pothier said the discovery of one of the fort’s northwest palisades beneath a Montreal sidewalk in 2015 was the “key piece” that allowed historians to finally visualize the entire structure using information gleaned from an old treaty.