18th-Century Village Unearthed in Montreal

MONTREAL, CANADA—Construction crews discovered traces of Saint-Henri-des-Tanneries, an eighteenth-century village, beneath Montreal’s busy Turcot Interchange. More than half of the village’s residents were employed in the leather and tanning trades. “Montreal was almost like the shoe and leather capital of the world,” Dinu Bumbaru of Heritage Montreal told CTV News. Among the stone foundations of the family-owned shops and homes, archaeologists have unearthed wood tanks for washing and treating skins, cattle bones and horns, and a double-hilted knife used to make wood chips for the tanning process. To read about the excavation of a medieval tannery, go to "Medieval Leather, Vellum, and Fur."