Artifacts of Indian ‘Lost Village’ Still Without a Home : Lack of Funds Keeps Museum Project in Limbo 5 Years After Discovery

Nearly five years after archeologists stumbled upon the remains of the “Lost Village of Encino,” the one million Indian artifacts discovered there still do not have a permanent home.

Money for a state Department of Parks and Recreation project to convert a 19th-Century building at Los Encinos State Park into a museum to display the spearheads, stone tools and other artifacts ran out last month, state officials said.

Department officials have requested more money to finish the museum, but even if it is completed, the museum will hold only a fraction of the collection. Some officials say finding a place to store the rest will be difficult.

“No one has the money, the staff and the storage capacity to make this a steady collection,” said Alexandra Luberski, a department historian. “There have to be hundreds and hundreds of boxes of material.”

Subject of Controversy

The Lost Village has been the subject of several controversies since the day in 1984 when archeologists discovered it while excavating at a bank construction site on the southeast corner of Ventura and Balboa boulevards.

Archeologist Nancy Whitney-Desautels announced that it was the same Gabrieleno Indian village described in the 1769 diary of a Spanish priest who was with the first party of Europeans to explore the San Fernando Valley. Until then, attempts by numerous archeologists and researchers to use historical records to locate the village had failed.

The discovery was considered one of the largest and most important archeological finds in Southern California in 30 years. In 1986, Gov. George Deukmejian signed a bill appropriating $195,000 to display the artifacts in Garnier House at Los Encinos State Park, a few hundred feet from the excavation site.

But even before work to convert Garnier House into a museum could begin, the village’s spearheads, beads and stone pots became the object of a dispute between Whitney-Desautels and the company that had hired her to conduct the dig, First Financial Group of Encino.

In 1987, Whitney-Desautels filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million she claimed the developers owed her for digging up, cataloguing and storing the artifacts. She refused to release the items for public display until her fees were paid.

The dispute was settled this February when Whitney-Desautels’ firm, Scientific Resource Surveys, accepted $450,000 in exchange for dropping the lawsuit, said Joel Shine, president of First Financial Group. The archeologist also was allowed to keep the artifacts for study for at least another 16 months, he said.

The end of the dispute freed the artifacts for public display. The approximately 1 million artifacts are in storage at the Huntington Beach warehouse of Whitney-Desautels’ firm.

When she finishes her study and publishes her findings, the archeologist will hand the artifacts over to a public institution, said Harvey Moore, her attorney. “It is hoped and anticipated the collection would be donated to the state and the county museum, assuming they would take it,” he said.

Unfortunately, the state may not be prepared to accept the artifacts in the near future. Although construction work to make Garnier House earthquake safe is complete, there is no money budgeted to fill the now-empty building with museum displays, said Tom Winter, an architect with Parks and Recreation.

Winter said the department will request $233,000 in the 1990-91 budget to finish the museum. He said a similar request in the 1989-90 budget was not approved by the state Legislature. “There’s a lot of demand for restoration projects and not necessarily a lot of money,” he said.

Garnier House, built by a Basque sheepherding family in 1872, has stood empty for years. If the department’s most recent request is approved, the building could be filled with museum displays by the summer of 1992, Winter said.

Nonetheless, the museum--which would be on the first floor of the building, a single room of about 400 square feet--is big enough to hold only a few of the village’s artifacts.

Michael Sampson, an archeologist with Parks and Recreation, said storing the rest of the artifacts so that researchers can have access to them is an expense beyond the resources of the department.

Each artifact, he explained, is like a book--it may contain a wealth of valuable information about the people who produced it. Storing the artifacts so archeologists can get to them is something like running a library.

“We just don’t have the facilities,” Sampson said. “We can’t even keep up with what we have. We just don’t have the space to take on a huge collection.”

Other Museums

Sampson said he doubted that other public and private museums would be able to make room for the artifacts either, since there is shortage of storage space for excavated artifacts throughout the state.

At Los Encinos State Park, Park Ranger Russell Kimura said space for storage at Garnier House was limited, since he was already storing on the second floor about 20 boxes of artifacts excavated at the site of a 19th-Century tavern. “Eventually, what we want to do is to get them off the premises,” he said.

Lily Bauer, docent chairwoman for the park’s collection of 19th-Century relics, expressed some frustration at the delays in opening the new museum and exhibiting the Indian artifacts.

“I’ve been here 18 years and I’m still waiting to get into the Garnier building,” she said. “We should have something here from the Indian period, but who can afford it? It’s the money. Who’s got the money?”