http://www.pe.com/ap_news/California/CA_Indian_Remains_564141C.shtmlArchaeologists and American Indians told a state commission that contractors building a garden for a downtown Los Angeles Mexican-American culture museum on county-owned land mishandled human remains found there.
Speakers at the Native American Heritage Commission meeting Monday also accused consultants who evaluated the LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes project's environmental impact report of neglecting to anticipate that the bones would be found at the site, which was widely known to have once been the location of a church cemetery.
"What's happened with this cemetery is the worst assault on cultural resources in this city's history," said archaeologist Gary Stickel, who accused the consultant, Sapphos Environmental Inc., of ignoring historic maps that showed the graveyard's actual footprint.
A message left with Sapphos was not returned.
The LA Plaza project is being built among the adobe buildings and historic churches that make up Los Angeles' El Pueblo historic district, the site of the city's earliest non-Indian settlement.
Work has been dogged for months by complaints over the handling of remains that were first unearthed in October at the former site of the so-called Campo Santo cemetery, which was thought to have been completely exhumed in 1848.
Native American researchers located burial records in January that suggested the remains belonged to Gabrielino-Tongva Indians and other tribes. Since then, tribe members have accused LA Plaza and county officials of leaving them uninformed about efforts to make sure that no other graves are disturbed and of mistreating the bones that have been disinterred.
"Right now, those ancestors are not being treated properly," Gabrielino-Tongva member and archaeologist Desiree Martinez said at the commission meeting.
Martinez said she was particularly concerned about the treatment of the exhumed remains, which are being stored in more than a dozen bags and buckets at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.
"They are not being properly cared for, in terms of being separated by individual," Martinez said.
County capital projects manager Dawn McDivitt told commissioners that staff members were waiting to consult with tribal monitors before deciding how to handle the remains.
Biola University archaeology professor Paul E. Langenwalter, meanwhile, said at the hearing that he was appalled by the treatment of the remains when he visited the site in November to monitor students he had arranged to help contractors with the excavations.
But after he saw employees of the Whittier-based Sanberg Group haphazardly removing remains and using tractors for delicate excavation work, he pulled his students from the site in hopes of dissociating his school from the project.
He said crew members told him that they were being pressured to rush through the excavations, apparently so the museum's planned mid-April opening would not have to be delayed.
"Some of the things that I shall not repeat suggest intimidation," said Langenwalter, who declined after the hearing to elaborate.
Sanberg did not return a phone message.
County Supervisor Gloria Molina, who has pushed for the LA Plaza project in her district for 17 years and helped it garner county support, said after the hearing staffers had looked into the claims that workers were rushed and were unable to substantiate them.
Molina stressed at the hearing that county officials and museum planners carefully followed all state regulations for working in archeologically sensitive areas and that she was upset by the controversy that has arisen from the project.
"It truly pains me that this part of the story has unfolded in this manner and this way," she said.
Molina blamed the dustup on Sapphos' failure to anticipate that there would be remains at the site.
"Had they done better work, none of us would be in this situation now," she said after the hearing.
Robert Dorame, a Gabrielino-Tongva tribal council member, said at the hearing that Indian groups were not consulted when Sapphos was evaluating the site's history and importance as a cultural resource. If they had, consultants might have noted in their 2004 environmental impact report that were there likely were still remains at the former cemetery site, he said.
"People from generation to generation knew that there was a burial there," Dorame said, noting that the cemetery appears on contemporary tribal maps. "There's no question the area is highly involved with Native American people."
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Topic: Archeologists, Indians slam Calif. excavation work (Read 2130 times)
February 16, 2010, 10:33:45 am
