Digging for History

Hidden behind the bamboo groves and bank willows growing along Sulphur Creek, a determined band of treasure seekers gather weekly to battle the hot sun, buzzing insects and blood-sucking ticks as they pan for nuggets of ancient Southern California history.

Painstakingly, they scrape and screen earth and sediment in increments of mere centimeters, sometimes millimeters. They jump for joy and shout out the news of the discovery of items as small as a mussel shell or fish bone. In time, they will sort and examine even ancient insect dung for clues about the environment around this dig in the San Joaquin Hills, one of the few active archeological expeditions in Orange County.

“This is a very important corridor,” said Gary Hurd, curator of anthropology for the Orange County Natural History Assn. “This was a way for ancient people to get from the shore across the Santa Ana Mountains to meet other people and do things like trade.”

But there’s trouble in the excavation at Aliso and Wood Canyons Regional Park. At a separate site more than a mile away, grave robbers recently plundered four Native American tombs, apparently making off with human remains and rendering the site unsuitable for study.

“It was such disrespect for Native Americans and could have been a great source of knowledge, and now it’s gone,” said Melanie Salash, a Saddleback College student.

Only skulls were left when the site was looted in May or June, and those remains have been taken by Juaneno Indian leaders for burial elsewhere. The Orange County Sheriff’s Department continues an investigation. Looting Native American graves is a state and federal crime punishable by fines and jail time.

It makes scientific work at remaining sites all the more vital, because there’s no way to replace the knowledge lost by the vandalism.

There are an estimated 3,000 archeological sites around Orange County, places of varying significance where ancient people lived, traveled or buried their dead. Already, a third have been destroyed through development, and many others are threatened, according to Hurd, an instructor at Saddleback College.

“We’re making a real effort now to preserve these sites,” he said. “We don’t want to disturb or modify any site, if we can help it, unless it’s being destroyed.”

The site being excavated by Hurd and his platoon of volunteers is threatened by erosion, suffering during the winter rain storms. So the natural history association and county parks officials decided to excavate.

After the nearby grave robbery, they began excavating with more determination.

At the moment, they are digging into the lives of people who inhabited the earth around the time of Christ, or somewhat earlier. Eventually, they hope to go back even further, to about 4,000 BC or before.

As such expeditions go, it’s too early to reconstruct Native American huts, or show how they set their tables and washed their clothes.

But Saturday’s discovery of a large throat bone from a fish, coming as diggers entered a layer of dirt containing artifacts from the Hunting Cultures of between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, offers suggestions about Native American life.

“A fish this size would have been 6 to 8 pounds, so this tells us they had fishhook technology,” Hurd told the group in an impromptu lecture under the hot sun. “It tells us that maybe they had boats. It’s associated with other shell and food remains from the village and may tell us something about their health and habitat.”

Eventually, the site will yield evidence on whether these Native Americans enjoyed lush vegetation or suffered drought; how often they moved as a group; what sorts of tools they used and what they used them for; and whether they indulged in decorative jewelry and music.

“We know they were hunter-gatherers as opposed to farmers,” Hurd says. “So they moved around, and that would explain why we don’t see evidence of huge buildings here. We get a very different kind of site structure.”

As history, this former South Coast Indian retreat is particularly valuable because it contains what Hurd calls “layers of villages, one on top of the other.” As millennia passed, the wreckage and remnants of ancient lives became compressed into the earth--here layers of earth stacked one above another, each up to 2 meters thick.

The first layer goes back several hundred years; the next, part of the Intermediate era, is the one dated between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago. Still to come is at least one more “village” from the more ancient Milling Stone era, Hurd said.

The fact that the villages have remained distinct and stratified from one another is one of the site’s attributes.

Because it is in an area of frequent floods, rushing waters washed away nests of small, burrowing animals that can otherwise wreak havoc on an archeological site. Though small, a pocket gopher can move a ton of soil in a year. And, with up to 150 gophers per acre in most inland areas, there is a tremendous mixing and blending of different strata of soil.

This site does not have any damage from gophers, however, giving researchers a glimpse into the relatively undisturbed layers of life that came before.

But it could be years, if not decades, before the story is pieced together through the fragments of shell and bone.

“One of the reasons we don’t quit digging,” Hurd noted, “is because we haven’t figured it all out yet.”

Officials said that, although the odds are remote, they will continue trying to catch the grave robbers. Signs will be posted in public parks asking patrons to report illegal digging.

“If anybody’s digging up anything, they’re doing it wrong,” Hurd said.