OLYMPIA — South Sound’s premiere archaeological site was a busy place Tuesday as 27 students and supervisors from all over the country worked with painstaking care to uncover treasures from a 700-year-old fishing and seafood-processing camp once inhabited by ancestors of the Squaxin Island tribe.
Squatting in a 1-square-meter cell, Dartmouth College graduate Mark Williams used a water nozzle set at a fine mist to slowly expose a piece of cedar basketry or mat in an area of the dig that is only accessible at low tide.
“We first discovered it on the last day of last summer’s dig,” Williams said. “One of our priorities is to get it out this year.”
Now in its 11th year, the excavation along the lower Eld Inlet shoreline is a cooperative venture among South Puget Sound Community College, the tribe and property owners Ralph and Karen Munro.
Over the years, the fish camp and food-processing plant has produced amazing artifacts, often well- preserved in the shoreline mud where they have escaped decay.
Items include a toy war club, portions of a cedar bark gillnet used to catch salmon, ornamental baskets, arrows, spears and shell jewelry.
In the past two weeks, a broken harpoon blade has been plucked off the beach.
Also, two wedges made from elk antlers and perhaps used to split logs were uncovered in the food- processing area, which is higher on the beach and not subject to the tides.
Whenever something significant is discovered, Squaxin Island tribal elders are called in to decipher the cultural stories the artifacts help tell, said SPSCC anthropology professor Dale Croes, who presides over the dig.
“Every artifact either tells a story or invites you to imagine various possibilities,” said Dale Fishel, a Boeing Co. retiree who has volunteered at the dig for six years.
Croes paid his first visit to the property at the invitation of then-Secretary of State Ralph Munro in 1988 and forged a working relationship with the tribe after Rhonda Foster, the tribe’s cultural resources department director, took one of his classes.
The tribe and SPSCC assembled a field class to survey the site in 1999, found enough artifacts to pique everyone’s interest and entered into a formal agreement in 2000 to excavate up to 10 percent of the site. Slightly more than 2 percent of the site has been disturbed.
“Archaeologists have often exploited the tribes,” Foster said in an article that appeared in American Archaeology’s 2007-08 winter magazine. “Here we’re helping students learn how to work with tribes and teaching tribal members how to work with archaeologists.”
The Squaxins have named the site Qwu?gwes, which means a “coming together, sharing.”
Croes said there are hundreds of similar sites on south Puget Sound shorelines. He said the college and tribe are in preliminary talks about an expanded exploration of other sites, assuming they can secure permission from private property owners.
Croes said there is a touch of urgency to the mission. Since the Mud Bay project began, up to 3 feet of shoreline at the north end of the site has eroded away from wave action.
“It’s probably happening at other sites, too,” he said.
On Tuesday, students split their time between the wet part of the site, where the wood and fiber artifacts have been discovered in a shell disposal site that stretches some 300 feet along the shoreline, and an upland area several yards away where shellfish, salmon and game were prepared and cooked. Artifacts there include shells, fish and animal bones, stone ovens, charcoal and fire-cracked rocks. The site also includes a family longhouse area.
Everything discovered is washed, screened, bagged and taken to the SPSCC anthropology laboratory at the Olympia college campus to be catalogued. Many of the significant artifacts are on display at the Squaxin Island tribe’s museum in Mason County.
The excavation work is limited to a college summer class, which drew students from far and wide this year, including Tesla Monson, 24, a Princeton University graduate in 2007, and Vernon Vessey, 22, who just completed his bachelor’s degree in archaeology at the Washington State University branch in Vancouver, Wash.
“I’ll be looking for work in archaeology,” Vessey said. “Without field school experience like this, you won’t be considered for a job.”
As the crews toiled under open-air tents to ward off the sun, a bald eagle perched in a Douglas fir tree, staring intently at the activity below.
“The eagle’s been watching over us for the past two years,” Croes said.
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