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UNB students head to Cape Breton to perform ‘rescue archaeology’ before graveyard disappears

The historic French Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia Aug. 14, 1994. CP/Andrew Vaughan

Some anthropology students from the University of New Brunswick have been called in to excavate a 300-year-old graveyard in Cape Breton — before the historic site is claimed by the Atlantic Ocean.

For more than a week, the 12 students have been exhuming artifacts and remains from the burial ground just outside the gates of the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site.

READ MORE: 12,000-year-old Marysville artifacts give Indigenous people glimpse of the past

Parks Canada adviser David Ebert says five sets of skeletal remains have been found so far.

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He says laboratory testing will be used to determine their age, sex and how healthy they were when they died.

Other testing could be used to determine where they came from.

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Turcot Interchange archaeology dig

Parks Canada has referred to the project as rescue archaeology because coastal erosion is threatening to wash away much of the 18th-century burial site.

The five-year project will document and protect the burial grounds at Rochefort Point, where the shoreline has retreated about 90 metres over the past three centuries.

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