Don Rittner What do you do when you find the beginning of your history? By Don Rittner on January 27, 2014 at 2:10 PM
by Don Rittner
What do you do when you find the roots of your historic city? If you are Montreal, Canada, you excavate carefully then build a museum around it that attracts thousands to your city each year. If you are Albany, you might allow the building of a crude oil boiling facility on top of it. That is the choice facing Albany right now. When Montreal archeologists located the original birthplace of their city in the 1980s, they spent the next decade carefully excavating the site. Not only did it represent the history of Montreal’s founding but also over 1000 years of Native occupation before that. They uncovered buildings, streets, defensive walls, and thousands of artifacts and built a museum over the site which opened in 1992.