Fragments of a few millennia of history pile up in the Duberger industrial park, in lower town Quebec. It is here, in the basement of an innocuous government building, that the archaeological “vault” of the national capital and its millions of artifacts are hidden. The duty had access to the place: guided tour among these unearthed treasures of the past.
Over the decades, patient squads of archaeologists have excavated the soil of Quebec, digging into the earth in search of the eras it conceals. Tirelessly, fragment by fragment, they brought the past to light until they constituted an astonishing and rich collection of objects dating back to prehistory.
“We have around 2,000 cases of artefacts in bulk, explains Manon Goyette, archaeologist at the City of Quebec and responsible for the management of the collections. We have approximately 14,000 cataloged and documented objects, a number of which are restored. »
The reserve opens onto the workspace where four part-time employees are busy cleaning, drying, numbering, inventorying, classifying, bagging, wrapping and storing each piece discovered on the excavation sites. The nature of the fragments ranges from the immense to the minute: from arrowheads to artillery pieces, from chamber pots to the tiniest bits of ancient wax seals used to seal letters in the early days. of the colony.
Past the work area opens a long corridor with, at the end, the resistance room. Here is piled up, in a room with controlled temperature and humidity, the material memory of Quebec: shelves as far as the eye can see which contain, under the raw light of the neons, what generations of archaeologists have painstakingly found, then preserved for posterity.
Each object contains a piece of the past of this territory that Samuel de Champlain baptized Quebec in 1608. These artefacts tell the great story through the telescope of the little one: by testifying to daily customs through the centuries, these objects also tell of colonization, the British conquest, cohabitation with the Aboriginal nations and the emergence of an art of living and an identity specific to Canada, suddenly freed from the orbit of French royalty by passing under the English regime.
“There are a whole lot of things that we can document thanks to these fragments, continues Manon Goyette. It teaches us the lifestyles, the socio-economic level of the people who have lived on a site, sometimes also the construction methods. We can also learn about food fads, hygiene, etc. »
Hidden at the bottom of large drawers are objects that were once part of everyday life. All are handcrafted, silent witnesses of a time when industrialization and mass production remained distant.
Here, a set of blades useful for trimming skins prized in Europe. There, a surgeon’s scalpel and ornate rifle fittings. Jumbled together are construction tools, 19th century toothbrushese century, nails, shoes – even an impressive number of pins.
“That’s hard to find!” clarifies Manon Goyette with a smile that suggests that the needle in the haystack is nothing compared to the pin buried under several layers of history.
Another drawer opens, it’s an assortment of century-old jew’s harps that suddenly go through the ages. There, there is a collection of apothecary’s weights found near the Seminary and having belonged to Louis Hébert, the first official settler of New France. Next to it, a tortoiseshell comb “which could be attributed to his wife, Marie Rollet”. The domestic life of these historical figures slowly takes shape, inspired by the objects that made up their routine.
Imitate the customs of Versailles
The tableware alone bears witness to the evolution of industry and sophistication in Canada. “At the beginning of the colony, there was nothing. When someone wanted a plate, he had to wait for it for months, the time it arrived by boat, specifies the archaeologist of the City. From the last quarter of the XVIIe century, on the other hand, we began to develop local production. »
The nobility of Quebec, at the time of New France, first tried to imitate the customs in vogue at Versailles. “The table was the center of social status,” explains Manon Goyette. The three-course meal that we still know today comes from there: it was Louis XIV who introduced it. A whole assortment of utensils, soup tureens, ladles, flasks and other delicate glasses testify to this quest to import the opulence of the Louis and their court to America.
Physics and chemistry sometimes come as reinforcements to reveal the secrets hidden by these objects of yesteryear. “The English, illustrates our guide, mixed lead with glass to clarify it and remove impurities. We have short-wave ultraviolet light: when we pass a shard of British glass underneath, it flash purple, so we know there is lead in it. This tells us that we are on the English diet. »
The richness of the archaeological reserves of the City of Quebec, one of the most extensive municipal collections in the country, sometimes comes out to offer itself to the gaze. On average, about thirty exhibitions scattered throughout the province present his pieces each year. The Auberge Saint-Antoine, located a stone’s throw from the Place Royale, also exhibits nearly 350 of them. The pieces are also available to researchers.
Of the several million fragments discovered during the excavations, only a tiny part has undergone restoration. “It must be said that it is very expensive to restore objects. It requires budgets that we don’t have all the time, continues the archaeologist. Among the 14,000 cataloged objects, not all of them have been restored. »