PORT TOWNSEND — A Makah tribal elder who has lived most of her life in Port Townsend on Wednesday told Port commissioners they won’t find tribal remains on two sites they proposed for a Hood Canal Bridge reconstruction project dry dock.
“You won’t find bones in the first place,” said McQuillen, 72, who is also a former member of the Jefferson County Historical Society.
“You will find tools.”
The state in December abandoned its graving yard project in Port Angeles after archaeologists and Lower Elwha Klallam tribal members uncovered thousands of ancestral remains and artifacts from a former Klallam village known as Tse-whit-zen.
Dating back about 1,700 years, Tse-whit-zen is said by archaeologists to be the most significant Native American find in Northwest history.
McQuillen on Wednesday held in her hands stone tool relics she said were thousands of years old and once buried by her relatives near the Port Townsend shoreline.
Some of the stones were sharpened as cutting tools, she told the commissioners.
Round circle of seven
Some of the stones, which she said were customarily buried in a round circle of seven, were left behind as landmarks to symbolically mean: “This is still our land.”
She asked the Port of Port Townsend commissioners to make sure that if any such stones are uncovered that they are reburied should a Hood Canal Bridge graving yard be built in Port Townsend.
The Port and Port Townsend Paper Corp., in a public-private partnership, propose two possible construction sites for the bridge’s east-half replacement project.
One is about 18 acres of Port-owned Boat Haven property, the other 25.75 acres of Port Townsend Paper mill land about 4,000 feet to the south.
