Significance of Cave Argued : Debate: Native Americans say formation in tollway’s path is a centuries-old indicator of winter solstice deserving of preservation. Officials say shelter is ineligible for protection.

The centuries-old mystery surrounding a small, dark cave could threaten the future of a $1.26-billion toll-road project.

For 362 days a year, the little cavern along the Eastern Transportation Corridor in the western foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains looks like a hundred other insignificant holes in the steep rocks.

But for three days each December, local Native Americans say, a strange event occurs there that makes it a spiritual nexus. During the winter solstice Dec. 20, 21 and 22, light from the sun setting behind Catalina Island’s distant isthmus lines up perfectly with a notch at the top of the cave’s entrance, throwing one of its beams directly onto another notch at the back of the four-foot-deep dugout.

“It’s like a key going into a lock,” said Hank Stevens, a researcher who has observed the unusual light show each December for the past three years.

His interpretation: The site is a prehistoric “archeological observatory” used more than two centuries ago by local Native Americans, who cut the notches to measure time and celebrate the seasons.

“It’s like a sundial, except in a cave,” said Stevens, an ethnographic consultant working on a doctorate at UC Irvine. “It’s like Stonehenge. It marked the exact turning point when the days got longer, the renewal of faith in the coming of another season.”

An archeologist who surveyed the site three years ago for the agency planning the toll road--the Transportation Corridor Agencies--disagrees, describing the cave as a “rock shelter” ineligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places and therefore unworthy of preservation as an important archeological site.

“There was no evidence whatsoever to suggest that it was a solstice site,” said John Romani, a state-certified archeologist.

A group of local Native Americans and environmentalists is convinced otherwise, however.

And at a news conference scheduled for today, they plan to demand that work on the 24-mile toll road aimed at connecting the Riverside Freeway near Anaheim to the San Diego Freeway in Irvine be halted or delayed so that the cavern can be saved.

If necessary, they argue, the proposed road should be rerouted to preserve what they consider an important part of the Native American heritage.

“It’s part of our history,” said Vera Rocha, chief of a group of Gabrielino Shoshone Native Americans, whose historic territory included much of Orange County. Rocha is co-founder of the Spirit of the Sage Council, which she said is planning legal action to block the cave’s demolition.

“They are trying to destroy our culture, and that’s genocide,” Rocha said.

From the Native American point of view, in fact, the “cultural genocide” began in the 18th Century, when Spaniards arrived in California to set up missions and colonize the local tribes.

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For centuries before then, experts say, the state’s indigenous peoples had a strong culture of their own that may well have included a whole network of carefully calibrated “observatories” carved into the rock from which various natural astronomical phenomenon could be observed.

“There is certainly evidence that California Indians were interested in the sky in a detailed way and observed the solstices as well as other astronomical events,” said Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory who has written several books on the subject. “Some also believe that they used light and shadow effects in activities related to rituals, but that’s not the kind of thing you can easily prove.”

While dozens of caves suspected of having once been Native American observatories exist in Southern California, opinions vary widely as to their significance.

“Quite a number of sites have been reported where people have detected astronomical alignments,” said Jan Timbrook, senior associate curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, near where archeologists have discovered several such sites associated with the Chumash tribe.

“Often these sites are correlated with a prominent feature on the horizon, but we don’t know whether the Native Americans knew about it or whether it was just coincidence,” Timbrook said. “Just because you can think of it, doesn’t make it true; a good case can be made for several of these sites, but a lot have been proposed on shaky grounds.”

The cave in the Eastern Transportation Corridor--which neither Krupp nor Timbrook has seen--is the first of its kind found in Orange County, several experts said.

For many years, according to Rocha, the local Native Americans “knew it was there, but we couldn’t pinpoint where.” Then in 1992, she said, archeologists discovered the cave--which the Native Americans call Tuka’Par Rock--while surveying the area in preparation for an environmental impact report on the proposed toll road.

That survey, a Transportation Corridor Agencies spokesman said, was conducted in accordance with state and federal law by the state-certified archeologist in the presence of a Native American monitor.

“We went through the federal process and the site was determined not to be eligible” for historical listing, said Steve Letterly, the agency’s director of environmental services.

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Under state and federal law, he said, a developer is not obligated to preserve an archeological site. Nonetheless, he said, the Transportation Corridor Agencies plans to excavate the cave and remove any significant Native American artifacts prior to its destruction.

The toll road, for which $1.26 billion in bonds was sold earlier this month, is scheduled for completion in 1999. Exactly when the cave will be destroyed, Letterly said, has not yet been determined. The cave is located in the path of the roadway.

“The details of the construction schedule have not been worked out,” he said.

Native Americans and their supporters, meanwhile, say that they don’t plan to sit idly by waiting for the demolition crews to begin their work.

“You can’t really know the history of California without knowing the history of the Gabrielinos and this was an important site for them,” said Patrick Mitchell, an environmental activist and spokesman for the group planning the lawsuit. “It’s terribly important that this be saved.”

Said Rocha: “This was used by our ancestors many years ago before people came and invaded our land. They destroyed our culture then, and now they’re trying to destroy it again.”