Relics surface in Granite Falls

Published 9:00 pm Monday, August 2, 2004

GRANITE FALLS – Stones. The 101-year-old town of Granite Falls was named for them, but the legacy, it turns out, is much older.

Try 2,600, maybe even 7,000 years old.

Hoping to pave the way for a long-awaited two-mile truck bypass around downtown Granite Falls, scientists have found prehistoric flakes from stone tools that will have to be dealt with first.

During a routine environmental review, consultants for the road project found 274 artifacts, mostly stone flakes chipped from river cobbles by prehistoric tool-makers.

The archaeological find is not expected to delay the $18 million alternate route’s construction, scheduled for 2007, said Crilly Ritz, a senior environmental planner for Snohomish County Public Works.

“It’s not typically a deal-breaker” to find artifacts on a construction site, Ritz said, “but it requires extensive communication and coordination.”

People in Granite Falls have pushed for the alternate route because of heavy traffic from the gravel trucks of nearby mines. One truck passes every 30 seconds, and production in 2005 could push that to one every 20 seconds, according to a county report.

County and city officials are working on a plan with representatives from the Stillaguamish, Sauk-Suiattle and Tulalip tribes about what to do with the relics.

“They all claim that area as part of their ancestral homeland,” Ritz said.

The tribes want to make sure no spiritual artifacts are mixed in with the tool flakes.

No bones have been found, so the site is not likely to provoke the kind of controversy that pitted scientists against American Indian tribes and Europeans when an ancient human skeleton was found near Kennewick in 1996.

“We want to make sure that the artifacts are taken care of and that the area is respected,” Stillaguamish Tribal Chairman Shawn Yanity said.

The remnants range from the size of a fingernail to as big as a floppy disc, said Astrida Blukis Onat, owner of BOAS, Inc., the Seattle consulting firm that found the stone flakes.

Local officials prefer not to reveal where the tool remnants were found to prevent looters from damaging the site. Taking these stones wouldn’t be profitable, anyway, Blukis Onat said. “There isn’t anything in this kind of site that’s all that valuable financially,” Blukis Onat said.

The site’s real value is the knowledge it can unearth for scientists, she said. Only two other sites in the Cascade Mountains have turned up stone tool remnants of this age. One was at a lake shore, the other at the confluence of two rivers.

The Granite Falls find, however, is in a canoe portage site between the South Fork Stillaguamish River and the Pilchuck River. The different location should give scientists a fuller picture of the lives of the tool-makers.

The sites need to remain undisturbed, though, or the archaeological puzzle would get too jumbled to make much sense. Assuming all parties can agree on a process, the scientific dig would take one or two months, Blukis Onat said.

Then, soil testing for the new road could begin. Scientists and tribal representatives also would monitor the backhoes during that work to make sure no artifacts were missed during the archaeological dig, Ritz said.