Indian burial ground discovered at Bay Area construction site

By: Associated Press | Tuesday, June 22, 2004 9:20 PM PDT ∞

LAFAYETTE -- A centuries-old American Indian burial ground has been discovered at a construction site east of San Francisco, offering new clues about the people who inhabited the region long before the Spanish arrived.

About 80 sets of human remains and artifacts have already been unearthed, and at least as many are believed to be hidden beneath Lafayette's Hidden Oaks housing development, where two dozen upscale homes are planned.

Construction on the two-acre site was halted last week when the first remains were uncovered, so Lafayette officials could review the project and ask experts to study the discovery's significance.

Archeologists said they may have found one of the San Francisco Bay area's last, mostly intact Indian burial sites of significant size. Among the items recovered are projectile points, stone mortars and beads.

"I would not be surprised if in the inner Bay Area ... I never saw another one of this caliber for the rest of my life," Allen Pastron, an Oakland archaeologist who is leading the dig, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

The area where the remains were found was the site of a sacred burial ground more than 1,000 years ago. It was declared an archaeological site a century ago, and bones and artifacts have routinely surfaced since.

The site once bordered the territories of the Miwok and Ohlone tribes, but it's still unclear to which tribe the human remains belong.

The archeologists believe American Indians lived in the area between 1000 and 1400 and abandoned it about three centuries before Spanish started building missions throughout California in the late 1700s.

The find could offer new insight about how Bay Area natives lived, what they ate, what tools they used, with whom they traded and how far they traveled, Pastron said.

Archeologists would not disclose where the remains have been sent or the site's exact location, fearing that looters might dig up artifacts left behind when construction resumes.

Larry Myers, executive secretary of the California Native American Heritage Commission, said he hadn't heard about Hidden Oaks, but regretted that the remains had to be disturbed and the homes built.

"In a perfect world what they should do is redesign the project," Myers said. "Can't we honor burials that are here by putting them in a park or something?"

The Hidden Oaks discovery isn't the first major burial site found in the Bay Area. In 1997, 275 sets of human remains were unearthed in San Jose, and a 2,000 year-old Indian shellmound was discovered in Emeryville in 1999.

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