Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History

The Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History sits on a series of stone arches that lift the building above the spot where the city began. This is Pointe-à-Callière, built directly over the foundations of Montreal’s first settlement from sixteen forty-two. In nineteen eighty-nine, while preparing for the city’s anniversary, construction crews dug into the earth and hit the stone drains and walls of a lost cemetery. They kept going, excavating a massive archaeological site that now remains exposed beneath the museum floor.