Project unearths Ohlone remains
Story-Date: 04:03 a.m. PST Friday   , December 26, 1997

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Project unearths Ohlone remains
Construction site in Gilroy yields evidence of villages
Mercury News Staff Report

Archaeologists have found ancient human remains and evidence of Ohlone
Indian villages on a construction site in Gilroy's western foothills.

The oldest of the sites -- whose discovery in July was just confirmed -- is
believed to date back as far as 5,000 years, said Elena Reese, the
archaeologist hired by the builder to survey and excavate the site so that
artifacts and remains could be preserved.

That's the same estimated age Reese has given the skeletal remains of three
adults  discovered at the village site near Uvas Creek in the sprawling
Eagle Ridge subdivision and golf course off Santa Teresa Boulevard.

The Shapell Industries subdivision is Gilroy's largest. When completed, it
is expected to have more than 800 homes and the city's first 18-hole golf
course.

Grading for the project began this year, after a 10-year application
process. Construction is expected to begin in the spring.

The first Ohlone village site was found at one end of the sprawling
1,800-acre parcel during a preliminary survey in 1993 by another team,
Reese said.

Two other sites were discovered this year by her group, which included
Ohlone Indian representatives, Reese said.

The finds were not announced because by law such information can be kept
confidential by the city, consultants and builder in order to protect the
integrity of American Indian village and burial sites and their artifacts
and remains.

City officials and Reese agreed to discuss the discovery when assured that
the exact location of the sites would not be revealed.

Reese said only a small fraction of the construction site, areas where
building and grading will actually take place, has been surveyed, so the
parcel may be rich with many more artifacts.

The Ohlones, a loose grouping of Stone Age Indians made up of several dozen
sub-tribes that spoke eight to 12 distinct but related languages, was the
most densely populated American Indian  group in California. About 10,000
individuals lived between Point Sur and San Francisco at the time
of the first European contact in the 1700s, according to experts.

The Ohlones were hunter-gatherers who did not plant crops and used stone
tools.

Among the artifacts unearthed by Reese and her team were flakes of stone
from the production of stone implements and stones used to grind
foodstuffs, such as acorns.

Acorns, from the live, black and tanbark oaks, were a staple of the
Ohlones' rich and varied diet, which included bear, deer, rabbit, rodents,
fish, mussels, clams, snakes, birds, insects, seeds and roots, according to
experts.

Reese said the Indian remains found in Gilroy and the artifacts have been
removed to a safe storage place.

The remains will most likely be reburied at a different location on the
Eagle Ridge site, where archaeologists continue to monitor the grading
operations.

Radio-carbon-dating techniques placed the age of artifacts unearthed at the
first village site in 1993 at from 750 to 1,520 years old, according to
Reese.

She estimated the two more recent sites are of villages as old as 5,000
years and possibly were in continual use for thousands of years.

Such continued use was not uncommon for the Ohlone, as is evidenced by the
discovery elsewhere in the Bay Area of sprawling mounds of discarded
shells, some of them 30 feet deep, according to experts.

Both Gilroy sites, Reese said, may have been inhabited simultaneously or
perhaps sequentially. Ohlone villages typically were home to from a few
families to as many as 200 individuals, Reese said.

She based her age estimate of the more recently discovered  sites -- carbon
dating has not been done -- on the artifacts found and how they differ from
those at the first, more modern site.

For example, the 1993 site contained mortars and pestles, the stone
implements used to grind food.

The other sites contain those as well as their more primitive predecessors,
flatter grinding implements called metates and manos, Reese said. She also
discovered evidence of cooking hearths at the most recently found sites.

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