Archaeological Firm Works to Ensure Dignity for Prehistoric Californians
by Dennis Rockstroh
Copyright San Jose Mercury NewsAll rights reserved.
Reproduced with permission.
On a sun-drenched hill below Fremont’s Mission Peak, where eagles soar in the afternoon breeze over the brown oak-studded slopes, a mortuary for the ancients looks over Silicon Valley. For the last year and a half, the remains of prehistoric Californians - some who walked the earth when the Egyptians began construction in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes 3,500 years ago - await reburial. These people were rousted from their graves by the unending construction activity of a growing modern society eager for new homes, shopping centers and train stations. Today we call these people Ohlone or Megano or other names to set them apart, just as today we call ourselves Americans or Californians, umbrella names that cover a multitude of peoples.
In an old two-story house on the Ohlone College campus, in a building once used as the college’s radio station, scientists study the ancients. The small wooden building tucked into the hillside is the home of Archaeor, an archaeological consulting firm that removes the remains from the path of construction, studies and records their findings, then reburies the bones in the Ohlone cemetery on Washington Boulevard. In some familiar and some disturbing ways, these ancient Californians were like us. Archaeologist Christine Marshall held up a portion of skull and ran her finger on the outline of a sinus cavity. "This person had a chronic nasal infection," she said. Later, the boss, principal archaeologist Richard Thompson, held up a pelvic bone and showed me where a black obsidian knife tip was embedded in the yellowing bone. "This individual lived for a year or two because you can see the bone remolded," he said. "He must have been in a lot of pain. It couldn’t have been pleasant." Thompson said that 5 percent of the human remains he sees show evidence of deliberately inflicted trauma from obsidian blades.
"That doesn’t mean that my ancestors weren’t loving and caring, too," said Andrew Galvan, Archaeor’s senior historian and an Ohlone. Before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, there were 10,000 to 20,000 people living between San Francisco and Monterey. These are the people we call the Ohlone, although people who study these kinds of things say they did not see themselves as belonging to any large group as did other American Indian groups such as the Hopi, Navaho, or Cheyenne. However, their descendants today call themselves Ohlone and consider themselves to be a group. Galvan said there are about 5,000 people of Ohlone ancestry still here. "We’re here to stay," he said from his office on the college hillside.
Archaeor is one of more than a dozen firms that specialize in working with governments and developers to identify and sometimes remove the remains of prehistoric Californians. For years Thompson and Galvan worked out of a home office or their cars, building the business as the Bay Area was transformed from agriculture and old industry into the Silicon Valley powerhouse. As research and development campuses spread, new housing and shopping centers grew over ancient Indian villages and burial grounds. "We are now a major competitor in the market," Galvan said. There are nine archaeologists on the staff. And they have plenty of work.
Vast burial grounds lie under the downtown San Jose Holiday Inn, the Tamien light-rail station in San Jose, the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, the main post office in Union City, the Pleasanton foothills, the San Jose airport expansion and central Fremont, to mention a few places.
Galvan insists that the remains of his ancestors are treated with dignity, and he oversees their reburial at the Ohlone cemetery with pomp and ceremony about every other year. Galvan often uses the occasion to teach schoolchildren about California’s ancient people, inviting classes to witness the reburials. And although he is known to joke about the skeletons in his closet, his presence, he said, helps keep the atmosphere in the little house on the hillside dignified. "After all," he said, "they know who they are dealing with - their boss’s relatives."
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