VENTURA : It’s History and Students Are Digging It

From Ventura’s Main Street, the patch of dirt looks like a vacant lot. But it contains one of the city’s oldest archeological sites, waiting to be explored.

The dig at the Albinger Archeological Museum, located next to Mission San Buenaventura and opposite the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, looks as much like a garden as an archeological site.

Green olive trees shade landscaped lawns, and dark wooden benches provide a place to rest.

But on one side of the quarter-acre lie remains of the past: stone foundations of several Indian barracks; the foundation of Ventura’s oldest church, which was built in the late 1780s; and an earthen oven built as long as 3,500 years ago.

Students from around Ventura County take advantage of this local history, playing archeologists as they dig through the sand, piecing together broken pottery and cataloguing previous discoveries.

For a group of Newbury Park fourth-graders touring the site Friday, the most exciting moment came when one boy discovered a bead made from a clam shell.

“That was the best part,” said an excited Ryan Foster, 10, of Cypress Elementary School. The bead was put into a display in the small museum outside the dig.

“I liked being up on the hill, looking for artifacts,” said Jeff Dokken, 9. “It felt like you really are an archeologist.”

The students were among the many that visit the museum daily through the city of Ventura’s Interpretive Outreach Program.

“The kids love the tour because they can touch things that they have seen only in books,” said Patty Burrus, a teacher of California history at Cypress school.

The dig, which was opened in 1980, resulted from a fortunate accident.

In 1973, while digging in the area, a group of archeologists noticed that a bulldozer was about to take down some old buildings sitting where the dig is today, said museum employee David Aleman.

The archeologists, who had found some artifacts in the area, raced to City Hall and asked Mayor Albert R. Albinger to stop the destruction, Aleman said.

The mayor not only stopped the bulldozer but authorized archeological excavations.