‘This is the greatest of all finds.’ : A Rare Indian Skeleton Sanctified

At least two centuries after the strapping young man was buried in the soft, shallow earth of what is now Irvine, his remains received a traditional Indian sanctification early Wednesday morning in the Orange County coroner’s office.

Jim Valasques, a shaman of the Coastal Gabrielino Indian people, performed the religious rites in a brief ceremony, passing a sacred eagle feather over the remains.

The skeleton was found Jan. 29 by a jogger in Mission Viejo near the intersection of Los Alisos Boulevard and Cordova Road.

According to a report by Judy Suchey, a professor of anthropology at Cal State Fullerton, the nearly complete skeleton is that of a 25-year-old man who was about six feet tall and was buried at least 200 years ago.

Suchey specializes in determining a person’s age, race, sex and other attributes from skeletal remains; she works frequently for California criminal investigators. According to her one-page report, the Indian was buried without clothing, jewelry or artifacts, and he did not appear to have died violently. The man had all of his teeth, which were in good condition, with the exception of a missing lower molar.

Valasques said he believes that the man belonged to the Indian community at Mission San Juan Capistrano, although more precise dating of the remains would require carbon dating of a bone sample. The skeleton, along with the less complete remains of 13 other Indians found in the county, will remain in the custody of the coroner’s office, a spokesman said, until a suitable site for reinterment can be found.

“This is the greatest of all finds,” Valasques said in an interview after the ceremony, “because he is the most intact. (The odds are) one in a million that they would find another one that intact.”

There is considerable evidence of early Indian habitation in Orange County, where Gabrielino, Juaneno, Luiseno and Shoshonean tribes lived on land once inhabited by prehistoric people. With the explosion of construction in southern Orange County, more and more evidence of the area’s original inhabitants have been discovered.

Radiocarbon testing suggests that many artifacts found in an Irvine Hills dig in 1985 date back more that 6,500 years, when a small tribe of Shoshonean Indians migrated inland from a Newport Bay settlement to harvest seeds and sage.

The treatment of Indian remains in Orange County has been a matter of some controversy. In 1983, a local Indian leader charged that bone fragments unearthed from a bluff above Newport Harbor were treated in an “undignified manner” by coroner’s officials, who “used picks and shovels” to remove them.

Ray Belardes, head of 2,000 or so Juaneno Indians, said those bones--of a woman who lived more than 200 years ago--were the remains of one of his peoples’ ancestors.

A coroner’s investigator, Cullen Ellingburgh, said that he understood Belardes’ concern but that “the utmost dignity and care” had been used to unearth the remains.