PORT ANGELES — The city’s archaeologist, Derek Beery, intends to employ specially trained dogs to sniff for human remains at least a century old for his ongoing waterfront archaeological survey.
He is drafting requests for proposals for dogs and handlers schooled in “canine forensics,” he said.
Beery said the contract probably will be advertised this week.
“Historical human remains detection dogs” are specially trained to detect buried remains more than 100 years old, said Adela Morris, founder and president of the Institute for Canine Forensics, a Woodside, Calif.-based nonprofit organization founded in 1989.
The canines would trot and sniff through Beery’s 872-acre archaeological survey study area — a three-mile stretch from Ediz Hook up to and including the site of the former Rayonier pulp mill.
Beery already has a good idea of where human bones and other remains may lie buried.
He used maps, studies, and environmental predictors such as proximity to water and available sunlight to determine general areas of high-, medium- and low-statistical probability that remains and artifacts exist.
He’sestimated 15 percent of the waterfront has a high statistical probability of containing Native American artifacts or remains and 35 percent a medium probability.
Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles said she was “not surprised” at the 50 percent medium or high probability of finding artifacts or remains and supported using canine forensics for the architectural survey as part of “a case-by-case process.”
Klallam people settled along the Port Angeles and Strait of Juan de Fuca shoreline thousands of years ago.
Beery said if a canine forensics contract is awarded, “we’d look for hot spots.”
He predicted the dogs would go to work this fall, since they work best in wetter weather.
“This is not something that has been widely done up to this point in archaeology,” he said. “We are going to give it a shot.”
Private and public developers would use the survey and a yet-to-be-written management plan for a sense of how much they would need to study a site before deciding whether to develop it.
State and federal law can require higher levels of development review for areas that are believed to contain artifacts and remains.
Beery would not say where he believes archaeological deposits exist.
But artifacts and a burial site are believed to exist at the village site of Y’ennis, where the Rayonier pulp mill once stood, and they are known to exist on Marine Drive at the construction site of the state Department of Transportation’s failed graving yard.
That project was abandoned in 2004 at a cost of more than $90 million after the Klallam village of Tse-whit-zen was unearthed, and with it, more than 300 complete burial remains and more than 10,000 bones, bone fragments and artifacts.
Two archaeological studies failed to fathom the breadth of archaeology at the site.
The first study, before digging began, concluded no artifacts and remains were at the site.
Within the first month of construction, artifacts and remains were discovered.
The second survey concluded there were about two dozen burials, and work resumed.
More than 300 complete burials eventually were uncovered before the project was shut down for good little more than a year after the first soil was turned.
Morris, a former zookeeper, said in a telephone interview that she was contacted by an archaeologist who was working the Marine Drive site in 2003 when the project first started.
“I was contacted before the disaster struck,” Morris said.
Negotiations to come to Port Angeles had advanced to the point where she was looking for flights “and thinking how to do this,” she said.
“They decided at the time not to use the dogs and to stay with the traditional methods,” Morris recalled.
“They were concerned about money, and that here’s a technique that has not been at that time ‘tried and trued’ for archaeological work for human burials.
“When you look back at what happened, you think, ‘Could we have made a difference?'”
About 100 graves were found at one burial site on the property.
But Charles said the soil at Tse-whit-zen was too churned up from repeated industrial development to have made canine forensics effective.
Morris agreed that the dogs are not as able to pinpoint graves when bones are dispersed.
“What we would see the dogs do is, they will give us a huge area of where the scent is,” she said.
Morris said few dogs are trained to do the work, which the dogs must do in a slow, methodical manner.
“Besides our nine certified dogs, I know of 10 more dogs in the world who have done this work,” Morris said.
“It is a very small community.”
Her dogs are trained for six months to two years, depending on the dog’s age.
When dogs discover buried remains, they “alert,” or sit at the spot.
They are trained to detect bones of at least 100 years old, but the dogs’ noses must be in contact with the ground surface — they can’t detect through concrete.
They’ve identified a grave dating to 450 A.D., which was buried 5 feet deep, she said.
That site was “the oldest known ever to be located by a dog,” Morris said.
“There are able to pinpoint graves better because everything is contained,” she said.
They also work better when employed in conjunction with ground-penetrating radar, she said.
Morris and her dogs have been discovering buried human remains for law enforcement agencies for more than 25 years, she said.
“We know it works, but for the archaeological world, this is like a very new, weird concept.”
“Three papers are coming out” authored by archaeologists that will further validate her dogs’ work, Morris added.
Morris said her dogs are not cadaver dogs, which are geared toward search-and-rescue missions and detecting fresh human remains.
Her dogs include a German shepherd, an Australian shepherd, border collies and mixed breeds.
“You want a high-drive dog who wants to do something,” Morris said.
The institute frequently works with Native American tribes, Morris added.
“They know there are burials in given areas,” Morris said.
“We will work the dogs, the dogs will be alerting, and [the tribe] will have no interest in digging them up. To them, that would be very disruptive, bad karma.
“We done lots of projects where they know there are burials, but they don’t know where they are.
“The dogs say they are here, and the Native Americans say, ‘That’s good enough for us. You are not going to build here.'”
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Staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
