SEATTLE — The thousands of artifacts dug up at the 2,700-year-old Tse-whit-zen village site on Marine Drive in Port Angeles include etched stones, hand tools and other hand-made treasures.
But the artifacts, stored in 900 boxes at the Burke Museum of History and Culture, consist mostly of bones and shells that the Klallam people discarded after meals, said Laura Phillips, the museum’s archaeology collections manager.
The artifacts are waiting to come home when a curation-museum is built at the village site two miles west of downtown Port Angeles.
“There’s an incredible variety, an enormous number of fish bones and mammal bones,” Laura Phillips, the museum’s archaeology collections manager, said Friday.
“The bulk of the collection is what people were eating.”
Such artifacts are just as valuable as the ancient implements that make up more visually pleasing museum fare, Phillips said.
What modern-day humans might think of as garbage actually provides “an amazing insight” into centuries-ago cultural life and practices as well as trends in animal populations, she said.
“It can have a real impact in terms of today, how we see food resources, how our diet today is so much more truncated,” Phillips said.
For example, the examination of seal bones from Tse-whit-zen can provide clues about the history of the coastal seal population, Phillips said.
“These are objects that have a value to humans in some way,” Phillips said.
“It may be because of sustenance.”
When the curation-museum facility is built and the artifacts stored and displayed there, Phillips expects scientists will trek to Tse-whit-zen to examine the bones as well as hand-wrought pieces.
“Storage is a very static idea,” she said. “Those collections have a lot to say.
“There is a lot of information over time that will be developed.”
The Burke, which is also the state museum, put Tse-whit-zen artifacts on display in 2009 before returning them to storage.
They took up no small amount of space.
The discovery of Tse-whit-zen was the second-largest archaeological find in U.S. history, tribal archaeologist Bill White said in an earlier interview.
Phillips said the state Department of Transportation awarded the museum $342,000 last June for storage.
That allowed the Burke to triple its storage space, mostly to prepare for Seattle-area highway projects that are expected to yield Native American artifacts, but also to accommodate the large volume of Tse-whit-zen’s treasures, Phillips said.
________
Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladaily news.com.
