The relocation of Paris

French archaeologists pulled quite a stunt last month by declaring that, contrary to popular belief, Paris wasn't always Paris -- before Roman times, Paris was Nanterre, a rather dull city also located on the Seine.

Let me explain, for the confusion lies as much in the nomenclature as in the results of the dig. It appears that the ancient capital of Gaul, called Lutetia by the Romans, is not buried under modern-day Paris after all but under its unremarkable downstream neighbor, Nanterre.

It's an unprecedented attack on the French national identity and the greater glory of Paris by a group of dirty-fingernailed parvenus. (I must evoke a certain indignation on behalf my adopted city, mustn't I?)

The investigation was an exercise in "emergency archaeology" led by the National Institute of Preventative Archaeological Research, part of an effort to dig up any priceless artifacts that lay in the path of highway A86.

The team's findings have been dismayingly extensive, and include a zone that covers at least 15 hectares, apparently indicating the existence "not of a village but rather of a dense proto-urban town," according to the newspaper Le Monde.

The digging has revealed evidence of substantial urban planning: parallel streets, sewers to carry away waste, and houses with private wells. The archeologists have also found imported vases, Celtic money, and bronze jewelry -- signs of the city's economic and political clout.

Indeed, it appears that the site at Nanterre is the only important urban center to be found in what was the territory of the Parisii -- the Celtic people who gave their name to Paris.

The discovery offends contemporary Parisians' sense of history as well as their aesthetic sensibilities -- everyone knows that Nanterre is an ugly concrete agglomeration, still scarred from its days as an industrial outgrowth of Paris.

According to Alain Bulard, an engineer working at the dig, the debate over Lutetia "is Caesar's fault, due to his imprecise description of the oppidum of the Parisii." (An 'oppidum' is a fortified site on an elevated location).

In his "Commentary on the War in Gaul," Julius Caesar mentions an island with bridges, which the French imagination has identified ever since as the _le de la Cit‚, the heart of Paris and the home of Notre Dame, among other familiar monuments.

Today, the island bears a marker identifying it as kilometer zero, from which all distances in France are measured, making it the mental (though certainly not the geographical) center of the country.

Yet there is no evidence of significant human activity on the _le de la Cit‚ before the Roman conquest -- it seems the Parisii didn't live in Paris.

Archaeology, ever the spoilsport, has undermined the pleasant mythical continuity that makes of Paris the capital of civilization in this corner of Europe for as long as civilization has existed here.

This idea is undeniably appealing, and indeed the ancient Parisii are still quite present in French collective memory. Better known as the Gauls, their best representative is Asterix, the mustachioed protagonist of a wildly popular comic book series and two painfully bad live-action films.

Asterix and his menhir-shaped friend Obelix pass their time fighting dastardly Romans -- their village is the last holdout in the conquest of Gaul. This scenario still stirs up a certain Gallic pride, the word "Gallic" being of course derived from what the French call "nos anc?tres les Gaulois" (our ancestors the Gauls).

(Side note: in my literature class, there is a very serious student who wears only black and gray, uses Greek phrases in his oral presentations, and sports some nerdy-looking glasses. He also wears Asterix socks, I recently discovered.)

The "-ix" suffix (now there's an odd coincidence) on the names of Asterix and his compatriots is due, of course, to the story of courageous Vercingetorix, the great warrior and hero of Gaul whose end at the hands of the Romans came with a whimper, rather than a bang.

Caesar kept him alive as a prisoner for 10 years in order to parade him, humiliatingly, as part of his victory celebrations. Ceasar then had him strangled before the temple of Jupiter in Rome.

For us denizens of the New World, it's hard to imagine having such a close psychic connection to a primitive pre-Christian civilization, one that had no written language and in which men's lives were most likely nasty, brutish and short.

But for the French, the idea of having a 2200-year-old capital, ever located on an otherwise inconsequential island in the Seine, is intellectually tempting.

Perhaps this is why the recent archaeological findings have made such a modest stir in Paris. There is history, and there is myth, and at a certain Asterix-on-their-socks point, the latter supersedes the former.