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W The Tse-whit-zen site is dotted with tents that were erected over human remains that were disturbed by construction.
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Native American village sites uncovered in western Washington, encompassing nearly all of the graving yard’s 22.5 acres. And, in a discovery that ultimately proved to be the undoing of the project, scores of human bones, remains of those who once lived in Tse-whit-zen, also were found. As Kitson studied the postmolds found in the ground, other members of his team were packing up to go home. “We all just got laid off,” Kitson said, looking around the site in the flat winter light of early afternoon.
THE SAGA OF TSE-WHIT-ZEN began in 2002, when the WSDOT officials settled on the Port Angeles site for the construction of the graving yard. It was an important project—the floating bridge over Hood Canal was badly in need of work. After looking at several locations for the graving yard, a site in Port Angeles was chosen that is on the water and zoned for industrial use. In 2003, the state bought the land from the Port of Port Angeles. The hope was to finish the project within two years, floating the pontoons into place in the summer of 2006. An archaeological assessment was required prior to construction, so the state hired Western Shore Heritage Services, a contract archaeological firm based in the area, in November of 2002 to evaluate the site. When nothing significant was found, the state moved ahead, breaking summer • 2005
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d Kitson carefully scraped away a layer of dark sand, revealing a black rectangular imprint in the ground. “We’ve turned up what seems to be a number of posts here,” he said, pointing to the imprint with a trowel. “Circular posts, rectangular posts—presumably they were structural, but whether there was a house here or something else, we don’t yet know.” Kitson had spent four months working on this archaeological site along the shores of the Strait of Juan de Fuca in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Here, on a waterfront site in the city of Port Angeles, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) was building a dry dock—called a graving yard—for fabricating huge concrete pontoons. Once completed, the pontoons would be floated to sea, towed 60 miles eastward, and used to support a rebuilt portion of a floating bridge across Hood Canal, a fjord-like body of water that runs north and south along the Olympic Peninsula. But excavation work for the graving yard had revealed the remains of an ancient village called Tse-whit-zen. The village was occupied by ancestors of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, whose 850 members live just a few miles west of the graving yard site. Beginning in the summer of 2003, backhoes and bulldozers brought to light piles of mollusk shells, wood from structural posts, rocks shaped into cutting tools, and charcoal pits. It was one of the biggest
