From the Boston Globe:

Genialinius Gennatus was one fine duck hunter.

In the third century , he recorded his prowess in high Latin on a stone tablet that he dedicated to Jupiter. That and a hefty donation probably ensured that the tablet won display in the temple to the Roman god in the settlement then called Colonia.

Five or six centuries later, Cologne's early Christians, perhaps offended by the tablet dedicated to a pantheist god, chucked it into the silting channel between the Rhine river port and a small island on the Rhine, unknowingly ensuring the hunter's immortality.

Historians now know the ordinary man named Gennatus hunted ducks and prayed to Jupiter because of Cologne's decision to punch 2 1/2 miles of new north-south light railway tunnel through the silt and sediment that lie beneath one of Germany's oldest cities.

"It would not have seemed valuable to anyone at the time," said Bernhard Irmler, one of scores of researchers mucking through damp tunnel s beneath Cologne in Europe's largest ongoing archeological dig. "But for us it's another small window into a long-ago time."

The $1 billion cost of the rail project includes $194 million for 100 archeologists to dig, sift, and probe the depths in front of the giant, boring machines and other equipment that will chew out the subway tubes .

And what a fine mess archeologists and diggers alike are making. Great swaths of downtown Cologne are cordoned off for the scientific sleuths working against construction deadlines -- the dig started two years ago and subway trains are supposed to be zipping from Breslauer Platz to Market Strasse in 2010.

In a sense, that's lightning speed by local standards: the landmark Cologne Cathedral was more than 630 years in the making, from conception in 1248 to consecration in 1880.

"Modern Germans are a bit more impatient," Irmler, an associate archeologist with Cologne's famed Romano-Germanic Museum , said in an interview by the site. "Almost the instant the archeologists finish [searching] a section, the construction crews are right behind us."

More than 10,000 artifacts have been unearthed from the site, from the duck hunter's tribute to Jupiter to lumpy-looking rejects from a 15th-century pottery maker.

"The finer flagons would have been exported to centers across Europe," Irmler said. "The ones we are finding are flawed vessels that were probably sold cheap locally for use as chamber pots."

At an average depth of 50 feet below the surface, the tunnel is too deep to disturb the ruins and relics enshrined beneath Cologne, even though the line will pass directly under the center of the old city.

But the eight entrances to planned subway stops will plunge through more than 20 centuries of history.

That's why Germany sent in the archeological brigades first -- to ferret out what can be saved and to record what will be destroyed.

Not everything in the path of the construction can be preserved.

For example, the rediscovered foundations of all-but-forgotten St. Katherine's Church -- a medieval house of worship that according to legend was coated with solid gold -- will be blasted away to make room for the Severin Strasse station.

But fragments from the church's ornate columns have been rescued.

"Look closely, and you can see flecks of gold," Irmler said.

None of the discoveries so far will set archeology on its ear. Cologne's history is well recorded. But researchers are excited to find substantial remnants of the ancient Roman harbor wall, constructed of thick oak timbers almost perfectly preserved through the centuries.

The harbor lay in a long-lost channel between Cologne and the small island in the Rhine, both covered for more than 1,000 years by the expanding city.

"Every day we find something that may not change history, but helps us better understand the past of this specific place," said Irmler .

Among the other yields: amphorae, two-handled jars with a narrow neck used by the Romans to carry wine or oil, strewn everywhere.

Shells from oysters carried from Normandy as a delicacy. Burial urns. Old fortifications and sewage systems. Hair combs made of wood. Intriguing scraps from a workshop where crystal minerals from distant mountains were carved into religious displays for the cathedral.

"We find the stories of the city written in debris," said the archeologist, noting that scientific crews will scrutinize more than 20,000 cubic meters, about 706,000 cubic feet, of excavated material . "Every scoop is a new page from the past."

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Bloglossalia
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Adrian Murdoch notes some discrepancy in the name of the hunter in different news reports ... I think we need to see a photo of the stone.