Students spend summer digging up, preserving 300-year-old human remains

LOUISBOURG, N.S. – Young researchers are working against the clock to dig up 300-year-old human remains before they're washed away by the sea — and the project lead says what they found so far could give us a new perspective on what life was like in the 18th century.

Experts say there could be as many as a thousand bodies buried at Rochefort Point, the main burial site at Cape Breton's Fortress of Louisbourg, once a popular seaport and the site of two sieges between the French and the British in the 1700s.

University of New Brunswick bioarchaelogist Amy Scott says the narrow peninsula extending into the ocean just beyond the fortress's east gate is now under a siege of its own: rising sea levels and coastal erosion pose a distant threat to the centuries of history buried beneath its surface.

Scott led an excavation group of 15 student archaeologists from across the continent as part of a summer project with Parks Canada, and while their dig has wrapped up this year, another group will be back again next summer to continue the work.

They unearthed the remains of 31 people this year, and Scott says many of the remains were male — men greatly outnumbered women at the site in the 1700s — and the average age of death was 24, though she says the group unearthed the remains of several children as well.

Many of the remains show signs of blunt force trauma and fractures on their faces and hands, suggesting quite a bit of brawling went on at the fortress during the tumultuous time in Canadian history.