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Artifacts dug up at light rail bridge site |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Sunday, 27 February 2005 |
By JANE HADLEY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Find predates whites' arrival in Northwest
A significant Indian archaeological site has been uncovered on the banks of the Duwamish River exactly where Sound Transit plans to build columns to carry its elevated light rail line across the river.
Archaeologists hired to survey likely spots in advance of construction have discovered more than 900 artifacts in just several small digs so far, including fire-cracked rocks, stone tools, animal bones, shells and evidence of a structure with a hearth.
The site is believed to be more than several hundred years old, going back to a time before white people arrived in the Northwest.
University of Washington professor Julie Stein, a geoarchaeologist who has been hired to analyze the geology of the site, called the find "miraculous."
She said Duwamish valley sediments have seen so much human and natural disturbance that it is amazing that the one place where Sound Transit happened to want to put a footing was a spot that had been preserved.
"It's one of those situations where there's so many 'ifs' that you're just delighted," she said. "I think the people of Seattle should be delighted."
Asked if it was a significant site, archaeologist Astrida Blukis Onat said, "Very much so." She is president of BOAS Inc., which is under contract to Sound Transit.
"One reason is that the site seems to be quite undisturbed," she said.
Archaeologists say just a handful of sites have been found on the Duwamish, and some of them have not been well preserved or yielded a large trove of artifacts.
Stein said the Duwamish River has functioned as "a highway," the way inland from Puget Sound, the way to get to Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish, and across the Cascades.
"The opportunity to see a glimpse of what happened on that highway preserved is somewhat of a miracle," she said. "Any glimpse we see is probably going to be important because of the significance of that thoroughfare."
The Federal Transit Administration has declared the site to be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places because it is "likely to yield information important in prehistory or history."
The Muckleshoot, Duwamish and Suquamish Indian tribes have been called in.
The light rail line is not likely to be either delayed or rerouted, said James Irish, Sound Transit's environmental program manager. That's because archaeologists will have plenty of time before construction needs to begin to carefully and fully excavate the site. Also, no human remains have been found, nor are expected to be found, Blukis Onat said.
Full-blown excavation is scheduled to begin March 7 and take about six weeks. A backhoe will excavate the first 2 feet of soil over a 39-square-yard area. Eight field archaeologists, including one from the Muckleshoot Tribe, will then sift through the soil with hand trowels.
State archaeologist Robert Whitlam agreed the site deserves listing on the historic register.
"To find an intact archaeological site there is an important contribution to the history of Seattle and to an understanding of the time depth of people's living in the city and the Puget Sound area," he said.
Laura Murphy, an archaeologist with the Muckleshoot Tribe, wrote Whitlam and Irish that the discovery of the site "and the intact and possibly extensive nature of the deposits is very exciting, and confirms lines of evidence previously gathered from oral history that reflect extensive Indian use of the area."
Philippe LeTourneau, a BOAS archaeologist and principal investigator on the site, said a BOAS team selected five different areas along the light rail line in Tukwila, digging a total of 14 shovel holes about a yard deep. Six of the holes were at the site -- known by the unappealing moniker of 45KI703 -- because that's the only place where something was found. All six contained artifacts.
LeTourneau said the crew digging the holes knew they had something when they spotted a black stripe in the soil.
"It's full of charcoal, which means a fire," he said. "You can have natural fires, but you wouldn't usually have a layer this thick with this much charcoal and that layer also contains artifacts. It's just so different from everything out there."
Most of the artifacts were fire-modified rock. When rocks are exposed to high temperatures or a quick temperature change, they shatter into distinctive irregularly shaped pieces with jagged edges, LeTourneau said. It could have been rock used to line a hearth or heated hot enough to put in a basket to boil water.
The crew also found 44 stone flakes from making tools. They found three tools: a scraper and two flakes shaped into cutting tools.
They also found pieces of red ocher, iron oxide used "throughout prehistory all over the place as a pigment for coloring things," LeTourneau said. "They're not naturally there."
They found two separate "lenses of compact oxidized sediments that are probably remnants of one or more hearths."
A vertical feature about 8 inches in diameter found in the soil is probably a "post mold," which once held a post used to support a structure or drying rack. The post decomposed and was filled up with other material that is a different color from the material around it.
Another downward curving feature is believed to be "a mantle of midden accumulation on an earthen berm that parallels the river."
Also found were 105 pieces of animal bones, most fragments, poorly preserved and unidentifiable, though some could be identified as either animal or fish. There were no obvious bird bones. The animal bones could be deer and rabbit. They found 15 shell fragments, two identifiable as mussels and one as a clam.
LeTourneau projected that the excavation is expected to recover about 11,000 prehistoric artifacts, of which just under 9,000 will be fire-modified rock.
"I don't know what this site is going to hold," Stein said. "I don't know how old it is. But the number of artifacts, the evidence of fish and shellfish! It's exciting that we can tell what people are eating."
The site was agricultural for several hundred years and in recent years was a residential yard with a vegetable garden. But the layer of artifacts was found below the "plough zone" at depths between about 28 inches and 69 inches deep.
LeTourneau emphasized in his report that only 5 percent of the artifacts were found outside the archaeological "features" of the site, indicating there had been no site disturbance by either the river cutting into the site or by later human activity.
"Taken as a whole, we believe that the cultural deposits at 45KI703 represent an intact prehistoric structure that was burned and was subsequently buried by floodplain sedimentation," the summary and conclusions section of the report said.
Archaeologists will soon take up residence at an old house on the site, establishing a field laboratory there.
During the excavation they will develop a detailed three-dimensional picture of the site from elaborate excavation procedures. After artifacts are collected, cleaned and classified, a few will be selected for "protein analysis" to identify plant or animal material on remaining tool edges. Other materials will be sent for radiocarbon dating.
Radiocarbon dating from a site found at Allentown a short distance away in the 1990s placed that site between 200 and 540 years old. LeTourneau speculated based on that evidence and the depth of these finds, this site would be about the same, probably slightly older.
There is no sign of artifacts like glass beads or nails or "settler stuff," further suggesting it is a prehistoric site.
A plan developed for the excavation estimated that a final report on the site would not be finished until mid-2006.
Murphy of the Muckleshoots said the tribe would like to be able to borrow and analyze the materials and display the collection at its "repository facility." Irish responded that Sound Transit would be happy to "work with" the Muckleshoot Tribe on meeting those requests, but noted that the Muckleshoot facility would have to be federally approved for storing the collection and the other two tribes would have to consent.
Neither Murphy nor other Muckleshoot officials returned phone calls from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. But Cecile Hansen, chairwoman of the Duwamish Tribe, objected that the Muckleshoots "are not the indigenous people. We are. I don't believe Muckleshoot is a tribe."
Though both the Muckleshoot and Suquamish are federally recognized tribes, the Bush administration withdrew recognition of the Duwamish Tribe, which had won it only a few months earlier. Sound Transit has officially consulted all three tribes.
OTHER DISCOVERIES
1970: Beachcombers discover Ozette, the Olympic Coast site of an ancient Makah village that was preserved by a mudslide more than 500 years ago. The discovery yields one of the Northwest's richest archaeological finds, with more than 60,000 artifacts.
2003: Workers at a Port Angeles site the state wanted to use for building new pontoons for the Hood Canal floating bridge unearth bones and artifacts that lead to the discovery of Tse-whit-zen, a Klallam Indian village and burial site dating back about 1,700 years. The state later abandons construction on the site.
2004: Contractors conducting an environmental survey for a highway bypass project near Granite Falls discover hundreds of stone flakes -- likely the remnants of ancient toolmaking thousands of years ago.
2002-05: Arrowheads, fire-cracked pots, house planks and other artifacts are unearthed during a park and highway project to mark the Lewis and Clark bicentennial on the Washington side of the Columbia River west of the Astoria Bridge. The discovery of such artifacts, likely those of the Chinook Tribe, at least temporarily halts some construction.
Seattle Post Intelligencer, http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/transportation/213579_artifacts25.html |
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