In the tranquil municipality of Nieuwpoort, Belgium, the construction of a mundane administrative hub has suddenly become a veritable time machine. As excavators prepared the ground for the future foundations, archaeologists uncovered a dizzying archaeological discovery: 500 cannonballs. Beneath this planned civil building lay an impressive military arsenal, unusually uniting the relics of a heavily equipped medieval era with the deadly scars of World War I.
What you will learn:
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Why the construction site for the future town hall revealed a strategically located area dating back several centuries.
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The secret of the 500 stone cannonballs: what they tell us about the technological transition of siege weapons.
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The terrifying historical collision with the discovery of an unexploded shell from 1914 in the same trench.
A construction site under strict archaeological supervision
The urban development plan called for the construction of a brand-new government center, with the laying of the foundation stone scheduled for the end of 2026. But in Nieuwpoort, you do not dig the ground with impunity. The chosen site sits at a highly strategic location, wedged exactly between the current town hall and the city’s ancient defensive walls.
The Van Vooren archaeological team, commissioned by the city to secure the site, expected to unearth a few medieval foundations. They did indeed uncover old walls and paved floors bearing witness to the administrative activity and daily life of the era. But this routine dig quickly took a far more spectacular turn.
The intact arsenal along the southern wall
Delving a little deeper, the team stumbled upon a staggering stock: 500 medieval cannonballs perfectly preserved. Carved from natural stone with an exceptional finish, these projectiles date from a pivotal period between 1350 and 1600.
What astonished researchers most was that these 500 cannonballs were not uniform in size: some were small, others massive blocks. Why such a difference? Simply because the city was undergoing a technological transition.
This stock of ammunition was meant to feed two generations of utterly different weapons. On one side, it provided projectiles for the old wooden war machines (such as the catapults and trebuchets that mechanically hurled stones). On the other, precisely cut cannonballs for the era’s new technology: the first black-powder cannons.
We even have historical proof in an image: a very old map of the city, drawn in 1641, shows precisely the presence of a giant cannon planted right next to this excavation area. Carefully stacked along the defensive wall, these cannonballs were never fired. They waited there, like the city’s emergency reserve in anticipation of a siege.
When the Middle Ages Collide with the Great War
Nieuwpoort’s ground proved to be a truly tragic multi-layer cake. As experts carefully cleared this 14th-century arsenal, they unearthed a much more recent and far more volatile death device: a large unexploded shell dating from World War I. The Belgian ordnance disposal team (DOVO) had to rush in to secure and evacuate the century-old munition.
This temporal collision serves as a stark reminder of local history. Located on the infamous Yser front line, the town of Nieuwpoort was literally erased from the map and pulverized by artillery between 1914 and 1918. For the mayor of the town, Kris Vandecasteele, uncovering a thousand years of military strategy and destruction in the same trench is a powerful symbol. The future administrative center will thus be built on the foundations of those who, from one century to the next, fiercely defended the city.
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