6,000-year-old canoes give a look at Neolithic Paris

PARIS - Thousands of years before the Bateaux Mouches began plying the Seine with sightseers, Neolithic Parisians cruised the river in dugout canoes, fishing and trading with their neighbors upstream.

Three 6,000-year-old canoes, unveiled Thursday, suggest human settlements were set up at the location of present-day Paris up to 1,500 years earlier than had been believed.

The 20-foot canoes, each hewn from a single oak log, will be the centerpiece of a new wing of the Carnavalet Museum scheduled to open later this year.

The dugouts, the earliest of which experts say dates to 4,500 B.C., were unearthed along with thousands of artifacts by French archaeologists in 1990 during a major urban renewal project on the banks of the Seine at Bercy, in southeastern Paris.

''The site is the most spectacular of its kind ever found in Paris and shows that the city is much older than we had thought,'' said Philippe Velay, archaeology curator at the Carnavalet.

Other Neolithic remains were found under the courtyard of the Louvre Museum in central Paris when it was undergoing renovations in the early 1980s, he said. But that find, much smaller than the Bercy one, was not studied in depth at the time.

Together, the finds suggest two Neolithic communities a few miles apart that had contact with each other via the Seine, which at the time was over a mile wide in parts. Experts had previously put the earliest settlements in the Paris region to around 3,000-2,500 B.C.

The Neolithic period, characterized by polished stone tools, pottery and agriculture, ranges from 8,000-3,500 B.C.

The Bercy site could have had between a few hundred and a thousand people living in it at one time. Along with a total 11 canoes, archaeologists found some 50,000 objects - including perfectly preserved fragments of ceramic bowls and cups, a flint and a millstone. A double tomb was unearthed containing the skeletons of two children, aged 9 and 5, curled in the fetal position.

Also found were a polished ax, wooden bow and a fish hook, as well as beaver, turtle and wolf remains, Velay said. ''This suggests that the earliest city dwellers were concerned primarily with their own survival, and hunted and fished for food,'' he said.

The canoes - some large enough to hold six people - were found about 26 feet underground, perfectly preserved in the soil. One boat was split in half inadvertently by a bulldozer working on the site.

''The biggest challenge was figuring out a way to make sure that their discovery was not the first step towards their disappearance,'' said archaeologist Philippe Marquis, who made the discovery in September 1990.

''We had to make sure they didn't just dry out and crumble, and basically, we just kept them wet using an ordinary lawn sprinkler,'' he said.

Marquis said that if archaeologists had had the opportunity to stay and excavate longer, they could have unearthed more of the settlement. A public park has since been built over the site.

Since their discovery, which was not made public at the time, the canoes underwent a $280,000 treatment at a laboratory in Grenoble to stabilize the condition of the wood. They will be displayed in temperature- and humidity-controlled cases.