Louis Sahagun writes for the Los Angeles Times this week about the discovery of Native American human remains as Caltrans proceeds with work to expand a segment of Highway 395, which runs north/south in eastern California. The headline is "Indigenous tribes warned of a buried kingdom in Owens Valley. Now, Caltrans bulldozers are unearthing bones." The dateline is Cartago, population 92. An excerpt follows, focusing on the conflict this discovery has surfaced between Paiute Indians and the State of California.
It didn’t take long for a team of highway archaeologists to mark their first find while searching for buried human remains on an aging stretch of U.S. Highway 395 that cuts along the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada range.
That alone was enough to concern local tribal leaders, but they went on to hit more bones missed by earlier archaeological surveys required to start construction of a $69.7-million Caltrans project to convert 12.6 miles of 395 from a two-lane road to a safer four-lane expressway.
State and federal laws prohibit public disclosure of information related to the locations of Native American cultural places to reduce their vulnerability to various types of theft, including grave robbing. But as of last week, tribal leaders say, more than 30 tangled human skeletons had been unearthed at the site near the Inyo County community of Cartago, many of them adorned with artifacts: glass beads, abalone shells and arrowheads.
Now, as nearby bulldozers lumber over huge mounds of excavated earth, tribal historic preservation officers are demanding that the California Department of Transportation halt construction and realign the project to avoid the gravesites.
“We’re saying, ‘Stop!’ Your gigantic highway project is disrupting the peace of untold numbers of ancestors in a place that had gone undisturbed for thousands of years,” said Sean Scruggs, tribal historic officer for the Fort Independence Indian Community of Paiute Indians.
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