Differing Reports Often Are Bone of Contention : Archeology: Cal State Long Beach scientists dispute consultant’s report clearing way for building on possible site of old Indian village.

One of the first people to see the money to be made in archeology-for-hire was Roger J. Desautels, who started a small consulting firm in the late 1960s in the midst of a building boom in suburban Orange County.

In the late 1970s, Cal State Long Beach hired Desautels to do some test digging on an organic garden at one end of a 22-acre strip of land along busy Bellflower Boulevard where the university was thinking about building.

That strip of land at Cal State Long Beach had long been thought by some archeologists--like Cal State faculty member Keith Dixon--to be at least part of the Indian village of Puvungna, if not the village itself.

These archeologists theorized that Puvungna had perhaps shifted to various locations on the hill on which Cal State sits. As their dozen or so huts of woven reeds over sapling frames wore out, the Indians simply built new ones nearby.

On the basis of this theory, in 1974 Dixon got the land placed on the National Register of Historic Places--one of only three archeological sites on the list in Los Angeles County.

Puvungna was home to the god Chinichnich, who was venerated--sometimes with a hallucinogenic concoction of jimson weed--all over Southern California.

When Desautels’ report came out, it said he’d found some evidence--such as broken shells--that Indians had lived there.

But, he said, this evidence was so mashed up from farming and trash-dumping that it was useless to an archeologist.

Not so, replied Dixon and another faculty archeologist who had been asked by the university to review the report. They denounced it as “inadequate” and “biased.” Dixon, who has since retired, said it looked suspiciously like it had been tailored to fit the university’s development plans.

Cal State ordered the other faculty member to do her own survey. It contradicted Desautels.

The university ignored or didn’t find the reports in its own files. Last December, nearly 10 years after Desautels did the original study, the university published a legal notice stating there was nothing of archeological value under the land. That meant the university--which had revived its building plans--could start interviewing developers to lease the land and build West Village Center, a proposed complex of shops, offices, restaurants, condos and a hotel.

Now, however, after months of protests by Gabrielino and Juaneno Indians and by the organic gardeners pushed off the lot in June by the university, Cal State says it was all a “big mistake.” Associate Vice President Keith Polakoff, assigned by the university to what he calls “damage control,” points the finger at an obscure university office called physical planning and management.

“They’re so focused on physical construction over there, they don’t know very much else of what’s going on in the world,” says Polakoff. “They didn’t do the checking they should have done.”

The university has ordered up a new archeological study.

Whether this one turns up evidence that Puvungna actually lies under the grass next to Bellflower Boulevard is open to question. Other archeologists say the best historical records suggest that Puvungna was actually several blocks away--under what is now a subdivision.

But that question has become immaterial to the Gabrielinos and their supporters. They say that it’s no longer what’s actually under the ground that’s important; what matters is that the land should be set aside as open space to represent the last vestige of Puvungna. They even oppose another archeological survey.

Two weeks ago the Gabrielinos and the ACLU got a judge in Los Angeles to halt everything until a trial. The Indians say they’re being denied their constitutional right to religious freedom; the university responds with another constitutional argument, that for a public institution to turn over public land for religious purposes would violate the separation of church and state.

However the study turns out--if it ever gets done--the consultant who does it isn’t likely to be Desautels’ company, Scientific Resource Surveys Inc. of Huntington Beach, says Polakoff. The company is now run by his widow, Nancy Whitney-Desautels, who did not return phone calls.

SRS was “too closely tied to developers” to handle the Cal State Long Beach research, Polakoff said. “The company is not entirely trusted by the Native American community.”