GRAVING YARD, GRAVEYARD

The Tse-whit-zen site is dotted with tents that were erected over human remains that were disturbed by construction.

Ed 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 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

Graving Yard, Graveyard

When an archaeological assessment found no significant cultural resources, construction of a urgently needed graving yard began on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Construction stopped when a huge cemetery was discovered beneath the construction site. Hundreds of graves were disturbed, and the State of Washington lost millions of dollars. How did it happen?

By Douglas Gantenbein

Workers pause to pay their respects at a recently discovered burial.

Lower Elwha Klallam chairwoman Frances Charles counts cedar boxes holding the remains of tribal ancestors that were unearthed during the construction project.

ground on August 6, 2003. “That,” said Doug MacDonald, secretary of the WSDOT, “was the last good day we had on this project.” Shortly thereafter, fragments of human remains were uncovered.

Work screeched to a halt while the state and the 850member Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe negotiated how to proceed in accordance with the National Historic Preservation Act. The tribe decided to hire its own archaeological firm, Larson Anthropological Archaeological Services (LAAS). A second archaeological assessment that included LAAS, the tribe, Western Shore, and the State Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, was conducted in September of 2003. This assessment found, among other things, fragmentary remains, but it also failed to locate a graveyard. By early 2004 a site treatment plan was developed and a memorandum of agreement negotiated. One aspect of the memorandum was that the state would pay $3.4 million to rebury the remains at another location, establish a curation facility, and cover other related expenses. Work resumed in March, in accordance with the site treatment plan, with the expectation that a limited number of additional remains would be found. But the number soon passed 30, then 50, then 100.

By the summer of 2004, the volume of remains began to pose big political problems. The tribe asked WSDOT to temporarily shut down the project in May so that all remains could be removed from the site, including those that would not be disturbed by the construction. State officials balked. To resolve this dispute, MacDonald consulted the Federal Highway Administration, as called for in a memorandum of agreement adopted under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. The Federal Highway Administration, in turn, consulted the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Both organizations concluded that the state was in compliance with Section 106, which requires federal agencies to review all activities they are involved in that may affect a property that is listed, or is eligible for listing, on the National Register of Historic Places.

“By that point, nobody believed that we could predict with any confidence how many remains were there,” said MacDonald. “So while the spiritual and emotional concerns of the tribe were certainly understandable, the course they suggested seemed to create an almost endless program of recovery.” The tribe was greatly dismayed by the state’s response.

In November, a reporter and photographer from the Seattle Times newspaper spent several days at Tse-whit-zen. Reporter Lynda Mapes’ subsequent articles, and the ac-

This decorative hair ornament was recovered from the site.The birds at the top may be cormorants.The ornament is thought to be made of bone or antler.

Archaeologists work in the northwest portion of the site.In addition to discovering thousands of artifacts and features,the researchers have obtained detailed geomorphological and stratigraphic data to study sea level rise,effects of tsunamis on landforms and human occupation,and hunter-fisher-gatherer land use.

companying photos of the stacks of cedar boxes holding human remains, created a political firestorm. On December 10, Frances Charles, the tribe’s chairwoman, sent a letter to MacDonald asking the state to stop the project. “We tried to come with a way to devise an economic win-win,” said Charles. “But with bodies being found every day, there was no way. Every day there was like a funeral for us.” NOT QUITE TWO WEEKS AFTER that letter was sent, on a cold midwinter afternoon, archaeologist Dennis Lewarch, a principal investigator with LAAS, looked over the site for one of the last times.

Lewarch, a stocky, bearded man, walked down a muddy ramp from a parking lot adjacent to the construction site and into an area where workers had removed much of the fill that accumulated during nearly a century of industrial use. Along a dark bank, he pointed to a thick deposit of white-bleached shells. “We had a lot of shellfish processing here,” he said. “And just a huge array of terrestrial and marine mammals— sea lions, seals, porpoises, whales.” Evidence of postholes— fragments of cedar posts jutting out from the ground and dark stains in the light brown sand—were also visible. “We were able to map a huge area because of the postholes, and these dark stains also have linear arrangements for the corners of houses or some sort of structure. We also found hearth features and other cooking features.”

According to radiocarbon dates, the area where Lewarch stood was occupied some 800 years ago. This was one of several periods of habitation on this site, the oldest dating back to around 2,700 years ago, when the rising sea level led to the erosion of bluffs 100 yards to the south. Sediment from that erosion created Ediz Hook, a giant finger of sand that arcs from just west of Tse-whit-zen some three miles into the strait. Ediz Hook sheltered this waveswept site, and people quickly settled it.

The archaeologists hustled to stay ahead of graders, concrete trucks, and pile drivers that rammed huge steel sheet pilings into the earth. Workers attached flat metal blades to backhoes, scraping off layers of fill to expose surfaces containing archaeological evidence. Once those were revealed, the sites were plotted on a grid and excavated by hand. The LAAS crew recovered over 5,000 artifacts, ranging from fishhooks to antler harpoon tips to jadeite axes to combs carved from bone.

The excavation of Tse-whit-zen tells a compelling story of a thriving village that was home to scores or even hun-

This aerial photograph shows the construction site.Superimposed upon the photograph are the areas where intact burials and fragmentary human remains were found,and the areas where trench and auger samples were taken during the initial archaeological assessment of the site in November of 2002.The orange dotted lines show the first proposed location of the graving yard.This location was later changed to the area bounded by the solid red lines.At WSDOT’s instruction,the assessment,which failed to find evidence of the village or the cemetery,was limited to the area within the orange dotted lines.A large number of the intact burials were discovered in adjacent areas where related construction work took place.WSDOT limited the initial assessment to the graving yard location because it had not completed the process of obtaining all the necessary permits for the graving yard,and therefore it wasn’t certain what other areas beyond that of the graving yard would be affected by related construction work.

dreds of people. “In the state of Washington, this was a unique find,” said David Rice, a senior archaeologist for the Seattle office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Because the shoreline construction work could affect water quality in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the corps, in accordance with federal law, was involved in the project. “There were well-preserved features, lots of recoverable dates, good association for many kinds of artifacts, and evidence of lots of trade and commerce,” Rice said.

In April of 2004, WSDOT hired LAAS to excavate artifacts, map the beach, and study the geology of the site. LAAS was hired, MacDonald said, because the tribe was critical of Western Shore, the company WSDOT hired to perform the initial site survey. Meanwhile, Western Shore continued to work on the project. Glenn Hartmann, the company’s founder, chafed at the arrangement. He felt that part of Larson’s work was to second-guess his. Initially there was some collaboration between Hartmann and Lewarch, but before long they quit talking to one another.

As the project progressed, more and more human remains were discovered. That made for painstaking work. Construction workers using straight metal blades on backhoes carefully removed overburden (“Those guys could scratch your nose with that thing,” Hartmann said). Tribal members took most of the responsibility for removing the remains, carefully wrapping them in blankets and placing them in cedar boxes.

Fragments of wood found around the burials suggest that the bodies were either placed in a cedar box or covered with cedar planks. Few funerary artifacts were found. Recovering the remains was emotionally draining. “Once we came across a couple that had been buried in an embrace,” said Hartmann, a soft-spoken, bearded man. “And one week we took out multiple remains of children. It couldn’t help but have an effect on you.”

The sheer number of human remains surprised everyone. The moist, acidic soil that is prevalent in the Pacific Northwest severely decomposes bones after 100 years or so. At Tse-whit-zen, though, the bones had been buried in a sand berm, so they were remarkably well preserved. Ultimately, over 300 intact sets of remains were uncovered, with fragments of many more.

Once the scope of the Tse-whit-zen site and its cemetery became clear, the Corps of Engineers began having serious doubts about the project. “Any project in the past 20 years with that number of remains would have been shut down—no question,” said David Rice.

THE PROJECT CAME TO A HALT on December 21. The

Lower Elwha Klallam’s stand won support from some parts of the Port Angeles community, but it also angered many people. Port Angeles, with a population of about 19,000, has never recovered economically from the collapse of the logging industry in the early 1990s, when concerns over the fate of the spotted owl led the U.S. Forest Service to end most logging in the nearby Olympic National Forest. The graving yard was to bring 100 jobs and $17 million to the community. Moreover, the controversy over the yard threatened to make the entire Port Angeles waterfront, most of which almost certainly was occupied by Native Americans at one time or another, “archaeo-active,” as one local politician put it, meaning that no further development could take place.

Emotions boiled over at a February 2005 meeting in a Port Angeles restaurant ballroom, where MacDonald and other WSDOT officials explained why the yard was shut down. Frances Charles also spoke. With several dozen tribal members in the room, along with perhaps 200 Port Angeles residents, it was the first time that tribal members and town residents talked to each other in a public setting. Charles was defiant. The Tse-whit-zen site would never be developed for future commercial use, she said. And she demanded that the bodies taken from the site be reburied there. “Who will pay for that, who will pay?” several townspeople shouted angrily.

A number of interested parties agreed on one thing:

THE IMPORTANCE OF TSE-WHIT-ZEN

Though the discovery of the Tse-whit-zen village proved to be a nightmare for the Washington Department of Transportation, it is, for archaeologists, an important find. The large scale of the excavation was unusual for a salvage archaeology project, and it allowed researchers to sample all areas of the village. The site also presents an opportunity for archaeologists to track the evolution of a landform and how people adapted to the changes in that landform. For example, 2,700 years ago, the available space for habitation was quite small and the beach was probably used as a campsite. Over time, the beach and Ediz Hook grew, offering a protected spot for larger and longer occupations, eventually becoming a village site. A chronology of landform development and hunter-fisher-gatherer activities has been established from the more than 35 radiocarbon dates the site has yielded. Having discovered more than 1,200 features distributed across four acres, the researchers can also analyze what types of activities took place in the various sections of the site during this time period. “We’re particularly interested in status,” said Lynn Larson, the president of Larson Anthropological and Archaeological Services. The researchers can use this information to determine how these cultures were organized. The site was at a crossroads of cultures on the Olympic Peninsula, Puget Sound, Vancouver Island, and the Gulf of Georgia, giving archaeologists the opportunity to examine the overlap of those cultures, and the distinct Klallam culture that developed. The bone and antler assemblage, which numbers more than 3,000 items and is the largest recovered in Washington State, is providing information about sophisticated fishing methods, sea mammal and land animal hunting, and the fabrication of clothing using bone tools and skins. Hundreds of botanical samples taken from feature and midden contexts and more than 100,000 fish bones offer important information about diet as well as fishing technology and fish processing activities. The botanical samples also yield a glimpse of the environmental changes that took place. —Michael Bawaya

Gretchen Kaehler of Larson Anthropological Archaeological Services works at a laboratory where artifacts are processed.She’s holding a tray of animal bones.

Western Shore Heritage Services, the company that failed to find the cemetery when it conducted the initial archaeological assessment, was to blame for these unfortunate events. One newspaper columnist called Glenn Hartmann “The most unpopular man in Port Angeles.”

“I categorically reject the idea that the survey was inadequate,” Hartmann retorted, explaining that the procedures and methods his company employed were consistent with standard archaeological practices in western Washington. The site was covered with fill as a consequence of years of industrial use. Parts of the site were also covered with concrete, and others parts were below the water table, making them difficult to survey.

Western Shore dug backhoe trenches and took core samples in 26 places on the construction site. The company also reviewed geotechnical information, the site’s history, and documents about Native American habitation, including an 1853 map that showed Tse-whit-zen to be just south of the construction site. In Western Shore’s report to state officials, it concluded that there was no evidence of significant archaeological resources at the site. The re-

port also stated the site is a likely spot for past habitation, and it recommended that, when excavating at a depth of greater than four feet, an archaeologist monitor the work closely in the event evidence of the village was uncovered. WSDOT complied with this recommendation.

Hartmann noted that, in their official responses to the report, the Washington State Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation and the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe agreed with the findings and recommendations, and that the second archaeological assessment done in September, 2003, also failed to find the graveyard.

MacDonald, whose department has been fiercely criticized for wasting $58 million, didn’t disguise his displeasure with Western Shore and Hartmann. “Was the cultural resources survey adequate? I believe it was not,” MacDonald said. “Glenn said there is a village called Tse-whit-zen and it likely had a cemetery and it probably was on the beach and nobody has found it yet. It’s not clear to me that the fieldwork was designed to engage that background.”

But MacDonald doesn’t think Hartmann’s company was solely responsible for this fiasco. He also blamed the Port Angeles community for being so eager to sell the site that it wasn’t forthcoming with the state. “Glenn Hartmann would have had a whole lot easier job if the tribe had made known its available knowledge and the community had made its knowledge available,” he said. By this he meant that the archaeologists and WSDOT weren’t informed of the stories of bones being dug up on the Tsewhit-zen site in 1914 when the first mill was built there. MacDonald cited the “dysfunctional” relationship between Port Angeles and the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe as the reason for this lack of candor.

The state of Washington apparently wasted millions of dollars, the City of Port Angeles lost a project that was to boost its economy, and a site sacred to the Lower Elwha Klallam was desecrated. Some people in Port Angeles blame the tribe for the project’s termination. A number of tribal members lost their jobs when construction stopped, even as they were gaining a new appreciation for their own culture. Jami Green, an Elwha Klallam member, recalled the etched stones and other artifacts she found while screening soil samples for artifacts. “This really has given me a sense of respect for how our people lived long ago,” she said. “In those days kids had to learn to hunt and fish. It really was a different way of life.”

The various parties continue to discuss matters such as the acquisition of land for reburying the remains, curation of the archaeological collection, and the disposition of this site and its impact on the city’s waterfront development. At press time, WSDOT was still looking for another location for the graving yard.

Barbed harpoon tips,such as this one,were used for hunting sea mammals. This harpoon tip is probably made of bone or antler. These decorative artifacts,believed to be spoon handles,are made of bone.

DOUGLAS GANTENBEIN is the Seattle correspondent for The Economist.