PORT ANGELES — Even as work crews hurry to restore the site, Tse-whit-zen continues to disclose its ancient secrets.
“We find, every day, isolates and artifacts,” Frances Charles, chairwoman of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe, said Thursday about earth that is filling in the former Hood Canal Bridge graving yard on Marine Drive in Port Angeles.
The Lower Elwha workers began filling in the excavation in May.
Before the weather turns wet, the tribe hopes to rebury the 337 sets of intact remains unearthed from the site and stored more than three years in handmade cedar caskets.
On Tuesday, Charles stopped walking the periphery of the site to pick up a suspiciously smooth and oval stone, examine it and — satisfied it was just another rock and not a centuries-old tool — cast it aside.
Artifacts are stones or bones or pieces of wood that were worked for human purposes.
Isolates are partial remains of ancestors who were buried at the ancient village along Marine Drive.
Thousands of them, and hundreds of intact remains, were disinterred by a succession of industrial projects.
The latest — and the last — was the graving yard, a huge onshore dry-dock where concrete components for the bridge would have been built.
Thinking the site was free of remains, excavators instead encountered burials.
For months, contractors and archaeologists worked simultaneously at the site until in December 2004, Charles declared, “Enough is enough” and withdrew the tribe’s support of the project.
With it went about 100 family-wage jobs — many of them promised to tribal members — and $87 million of the state’s money.
Construction of the concrete components was moved to Seattle and Tacoma, with the bridge to be closed in May-June 2009 while they are put into place.
