PORT ANGELES — A man who lived hundreds of years ago along the shores of the Strait of Juan de Fuca was found carefully wrapped in a hand-woven cedar mat in the graving yard site earlier this week.
This is the first complete skeleton discovered at the waterfront site, the former home of a Klallam village called Tse-whit-zen.
“We found an intact elderly male ancestor,” Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Secretary-Treasurer Frances G. Charles said Thursday.
“We are overwhelmed to the fact that we have an individual who was not scattered like so many of the others.”
Since last August, partial skeletal remains of more than a dozen individuals as well as numerous Klallam artifacts have been recovered from the graving yard construction project.
They were located in pipe trenches and had been used as backfill during construction of forest products mills on the site in the early 1900s.
Construction of the graving yard — a huge onshore dry dock for building components of the Hood Canal Bridge — was halted last August when the remains and artifacts were found at the site just east of the Nippon Paper Industries USA Co. Ltd. mill.
Full construction is expected to resume in August after archaeological work is completed.
The delay in building the graving yard — originally estimated to cost $17 million — has pushed back replacement of the eastern portion of the floating bridge one year to May 2007.
