Digging Unearths No Reasons to Halt Civic Plaza : Thousand Oaks: The excavation is at the site of a onetime Chumash campsite and the Jungleland wild animal park.

Archeologist Joe Simon picked up a fist-size rock, one of the primitive tools discovered this week at a 1,500-year-old Chumash campsite and former wild animal park in Thousand Oaks.

“What we’re dealing with here is the remnant of a site,” Simon said Wednesday as he stood on the 23-acre former Jungleland lot that is slated to become the site of the city’s new civic arts plaza.

“It’s all been disturbed.”

So far, four trenches dug by Simon and his crew have failed to yield any significant artifacts that could stop the project, such as Chumash Indian remains, city officials said. The excavation is scheduled to continue for another week and a half.

In preparation to build on the Jungleland site, the city was required to commission the excavation as part of a state-required environmental impact report.

Two studies on the Chumash site at Jungleland, one by Simon’s firm, W&S; Consultants of Canoga Park, already had indicated that no remains were likely to be found.

Simon and his team of six workers have spent the past three days sifting through rocks and dirt at the site. Using pickaxes and hand-held screens, workers have uncovered about two dozen artifacts, including an arrowhead bit, a bone used as an awl and stones fashioned into scraping and cutting tools.

Thousand Oaks is scheduled to break ground for the new complex in January. The city plans to turn the former wild animal park at Conejo School Road and Thousand Oaks Boulevard into a $63.8-million development that includes a new City Hall and performing arts center.

The city is to award a $1.2-million grading contract next month, said Ed Johnduff, city administrative services manager, who is overseeing the Jungleland project.

The site was registered on June 8, 1979, by Tom Maxwell as an archeological site. Even then, Maxwell, an archeologist and Sierra Club member, estimated that 20% of the artifacts at the Chumash camp were destroyed when Jungleland was built in the 1920s.

Five years ago, Simon conducted another excavation, digging 16 test holes at the site. At that time, he found remnants of a camp where animals were skinned, suggesting that the site was used by migrating Chumash over a long period of time.

Richard Angulo, a spokesman for the California Indian Council Chumash and a monitor on the project, said he was dismayed to find so few Chumash artifacts.

“What I’m sorry about was that it wasn’t taken care of before it was destroyed,” Angulo said, gazing across the site, part of which is covered with asphalt. “God knows what’s under that parking lot.” But although Indian artifacts have been hard to find, the site is rife with remnants of the wild animal park, which opened in 1926 and closed in 1969.

“There are pieces of Jungleland everywhere,” Simon said.

Workers have uncovered shards from broken soda bottles and unidentified bones from some of the exotic animals that used to live and perform at the park.

Eleven pieces of the aquamarine-colored concrete pool that used to hold performing seals were also found, Simon said.

Those remnants and the Chumash artifacts salvaged from Jungleland eventually will be placed on display at a Thousand Oaks museum, Simon said.

“It would be nice to have some artifact that relates to Jungleland,” he said. “Fifty years from now, those things may be of interest.”