Digging Deep Into the Past : Ventura: Archeologists have uncovered many tangible remains of Chinatown dating back more than a century.

Underneath what was a parking lot until last week, archeologists are uncovering shards of opium pipes, ceramic dishes and ale bottles buried by residents of old Chinatown more than a century ago.

Seven archeologists started a 10-day excavation Monday on Figueroa Street in Ventura,

digging for trash pits several feet deep and hoping to fill gaps in Ventura’s history.

“It gives us a full picture of what their life was like,” said John Foster, who is managing the project for Greenwood and Associates of Pacific Palisades.

“They were washing their clothes, they were dying, eating and they lived here. They had their shops here,” Foster said.

Ten wooden buildings once stood on the site between Main Street and Santa Clara Avenue, which housed at least one-third of the primarily Cantonese population that lived in Chinatown from

the 1860s until the early 1900s, Foster said.

During the Gold Rush, he said, the ratio of Chinese men to women was about 9 to 1. Many ran laundries, toiled in the fields and

operated fishing businesses.

But because of prejudice, jealousy and political pressure to “clean up the town,” Chinatown was dismantled about 1906 and its residents moved to different areas of Ventura and Oxnard, Foster said. Some of their buildings were demolished, while others were taken to different areas.

“It’s really sad,” said Monica Nolan, a planner for the Ventura Redevelopment Agency, which is paying $41,000 for the dig. “It’s what we did with the Indians. It’s what we did with the blacks.”

From the layers of dirt that mark the passage of time, Foster and his crew have pulled numerous tangible remains of Chinatown: pork and cattle bones, medicinal vials, toothbrushes, barrel hoops, imported ceramic dishes and pieces of the Chinese game Go.

Similar artifacts were found, as well as small cubbyholes used by prostitutes, in a recent Chinatown dig in downtown Los Angeles, said Foster, who has been unearthing relics for the past 22 years.

Foster warned that some Chinese are sensitive about people forming cultural stereotypes based on the opium pipes found on such digs, saying the drug was used by only part of the population. So far, about a dozen pipes have been found at the Ventura site.

The crew also discovered a sewage ditch lined with large cobblestones leading toward the beach, as well as the tile floor from a Mission-period building that has never been mapped.

Foster was excited about the floor, which he believes was built between 1770 and 1830, because it is made of broken pieces of rounded roof tiles. “It’s something I’ve never seen before,” he said. “We’re always looking for gaps in our data.”

The redevelopment agency bought the Figueroa Street site in May, 1991, for $190,400 from the Soo Hoo family, which owns China Gardens Cafe in Ventura. The agency wants to prepare the 13,388-square-foot parcel, labeled as blighted, for commercial use in the future, Nolan said.

The parcel is one of 12 owned by the agency within a 155-acre downtown area that the city is working to improve, she said. That area is bounded by the Ventura River, Fix Way, the Ventura Freeway and Palm Street.

Greenwood has been conducting excavations in Ventura since 1963, including one in the 1970s that proved successful enough to create and fill the Albinger Archeological Museum, Foster said. The most recent dig occurred last year at Figueroa and Main streets at the Peirano Market site, which is a registered member of the Mission National Historic District.

While Foster sat mapping what he called “features” of the Chinatown site--such as where a trash pit or a building structure has been discovered--his crew members stood in three-foot trenches digging for history.

Referring to an 1886 map on his clipboard, Foster stood on the dirt surface once known as China Alley. Five feet of the former throughway now lie under the Knights of Columbus building next door.

Archeological technician Doug McIntosh, 25, dressed like movie archeologist Indiana Jones, broke up clumps of silt-laden dirt and separated the bones, metals and ceramics and glass into different containers.

“I can tell you what they were eating,” McIntosh said, pointing to the bones. Alluding to the broken ale bottles, he said, “I think they drank a little after work.”

The artifacts will be catalogued, taken to a lab where they will be washed and cleaned, and analyzed for age and geographical origin, Foster said. The most interesting relics could end up in the Albinger Archeological Museum, he said.

If the site proves to be historically significant, any developer who wants to build there would have to develop a plan to protect the history still buried there.

Failing to protect the site would be illegal under the California Environmental Quality Act of 1970, Foster said. “We prefer to preserve the materials as they are in the ground and leave them there,” he said.