05/29/2026
Workers found 700,000 artifacts under Amsterdam. Here's what was buried for centuries.
Archaeologists worked in pressurized concrete containers beneath Amsterdam's streets during the 15-year construction of the city's North-South metro line, uncovering a find so massive it rewrote history.
The sheer mass of material unearthed was extraordinary, with excavations reaching depths of up to 30 meters beneath the city.
About 700,000 artifacts were recovered, spanning thousands of years of hidden history. Prior to the dig, Amsterdam's entire archaeological archive held only about 70,000 artifacts. The North-South line project found 10 times as many.
Coins, bones, toys and weapons are among the finds, meticulously catalogued by location and organized by age, spanning the Dutch capital's 800-year history. The oldest items found were mollusc shells dating to over 115,000 years ago.
Workers had to acclimatize in pressure chambers before entering the dig zones or risk "the bends," where gas bubbles form in the body, potentially leading to paralysis.
In one spot, a mass of chopped animal bones revealed a butchery from the 17th and 18th centuries. In another, furniture fittings confirmed a furniture maker's shop in the 19th century.
Today, nearly 10,000 of those artifacts are on permanent display at Rokin metro station, which doubles as an impressive underground archaeological museum.
