No digging means no digging at the Port Angeles graving yard, the Lower Elwha Klallam say — no matter whether the excavation is for archaeology or a big concrete dry dock.
Frances G. Charles, tribal chairwoman, Tuesday clarified a point she’d made in a Friday letter to state Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald.
“The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe strongly urges WSDOT (Washington State Department of Transportation) to find a new site for the dock project,” she wrote.
That means no more disturbing the soil on the site of a Klallam ancestral village that existed at least since 300 A.D.
Archaeologists have uncovered 265 complete skeletons, almost 800 isolated skeletal parts and more than 10,000 artifacts.
Uncounted additional bones and artifacts are buried in 30,000 cubic yards of earth piled at the Marine Drive site just east of the Nippon Paper Industries USA mill, and still more are hidden in dirt trucked to the Fields Shotwell quarry west of Port Angeles before construction was halted in August 2003.
Hood Canal Bridge project
The 22.5-acre site is where the state wants to dig a mammoth onshore dry dock, or graving yard, to build huge concrete pontoons to float a new east half of the Hood Canal Bridge.
Work halted when workers uncovered human remains.
The Klallam call the place Tse-whit-sen and say they no longer will tolerate disturbing the ancestors they revere, be it by a bulldozer’s blade or a scientist’s trowel.
“Our No. 1 one priority is the ancestral process,” Charles said Tuesday.
“We have to have the respect for our ancestors.
MacDonald said he had understood Charles to mean what she meant — that is, that the site would be left alone.
“Our understanding is that if the project stops, certainly there will be no more disturbance at the site,” he said.
Still, he said, “there is some archeology work that needs to be finished. We’ve got to tie down a couple of details. But that’s because the archaeological work is largely finished.”
