Archaeologists in France uncovered the remains of a 16th-century public gibbet at Grenoble’s Esplanade, a modern fairground and redevelopment site with a much uglier past under the pavement. Around the structure, they found a series of burial pits containing the remains of at least 32 people—mostly men, with a few women—laid on their backs or stomachs, sometimes head-to-toe.

The French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) began their excavation, located outside of Grenoble in eastern France, as part of the redevelopment of a site that has been a military training ground, a location for national celebrations, and a fairground over the course of time.

Now it’s being remade again: Grenoble’s Esplanade requalification project resumed in May 2026, with a first phase scheduled through September and a two-hectare park expected to open in early October.

At first, archaeologists weren’t sure what to make of the site, INRAP wrote in a translated statement. They wondered if the pits were mass burials for military purposes, the remains of a leper colony, or a graveyard for a local Catholic church.

The turn came from the archives. Construction records from 1544 to 1547 matched the buried masonry to Grenoble’s Port de la Roche gibbet: a brick foundation nearly 27 feet on each side, eight stone pillars rising roughly 16 feet, and a timber superstructure above them. According to INRAP, eight reflected Grenoble’s place in the kingdom’s judicial hierarchy, and the structure could display up to eight condemned bodies at a time.

The gibbet sat on a slightly elevated terrace, with a drainage ditch on the east side to help move floodwater away from the structure—important in Grenoble, where the site lay north of the Porte de France in a river-prone part of the city. INRAP places the monument in the mid-16th century, as repression tied to the Reformation was intensifying, and says it may have remained in use into the early 17th century.

While the main INRAP discovery page does not appear to have posted a later scientific addendum after the original December 2025 materials, a June 2026 study day is billed as presenting “first results and questions” about the condemned people of the Port de la Roche gibbet.

The archives also put names near the site, though not yet on individual skeletons. INRAP cites condemned men associated with the gibbet, including the Protestant Benoît Croyet, accused of attacking Grenoble in 1573, and Charles du Puy Montbrun, a Huguenot leader in Dauphiné executed for rebellion against the king. A later Grenoble city-history piece noted that a decapitated skeleton from the site brings Montbrun to mind, but that’s still just a hypothesis.

INRAP’s wording points first to execution in public space—especially Place aux Herbes in Grenoble—followed by display on the gibbet outside the city. That means the punishment didn’t stop with death. The bodies found in the pits appear to have been denied ordinary burial, sometimes deposited in pieces, sometimes piled with others, in a final act of public degradation.

“The discovery of these gallows and the understanding of the practices they entailed provide a new case study for a burgeoning field of research concerning these places of justice—markers of jurisdictions, symbols of security, instruments of social degradation—and, more generally,” INRAP wrote, “for reflections on what it meant, or still means, to be condemned to an ignominious death.”