Archaeologists disturbed at least 20 individuals aged 800 years old during a dig in 1952, but within the next year they will be laid back to rest.
Dr. Carl Lipo, an archaeology professor at California State University, Long Beach, recruited students for his spring 2015 Anthropology 450 class to excavate an area in which the remains will be reburied.
The remains will be reburied in the area surrounded by a black fence by the entrance of Beach Drive, on the land known as “Puvungna.”
“I proposed we have to do this [reburial] as a big field school [for Anthropology 450],” Lipo said. “So we can learn about the deposit and collect the material as it gets reburied, so were not losing the archaeological record entirely. It’s kind of a win-win in that sense.”
The individuals and other burial remains were found at the intersection of the 405 and Bellflower Blvd. in Long Beach, where brittle fragments of white shell scatter the ground, though water has not run there for a century.
At this site known as California Los Angeles site 270, an archaeologist named Ethel Ewing along with other colleagues and a team of students excavated the remains of 21 individuals. Construction workers found the first body while working on a housing tract in what is today the Los Altos neighborhood, according to the National Park Service release of inventory completion.
A 1972 report by California State College, Long Beach professor Eleanor H. Bates identified site 270 as a burial site that can be associated with the Southern Californian Gabrielino-Tongva people. Archaeologists used radiocarbon dating to date the individuals to the late period, about 1250 A.D.
Though not all skeletons were whole, Bates identified that the individuals were buried in flexed positions, oriented from the east to west and surrounded by ornamental beads, tools and pottery shards.
“[Participating in the Anthropology 450 field school is] the beginning of really good things to come academically and culturally,” Candice Brennan, an anthropology graduate student in Lipo’s class, said. “Academically, it gives us more insight into prehistoric subsistence patterns, as well as teaches us the best practices for conducting an archaeological site.”
The remains were brought to the campus and deposited into the then-CSCLB archaeology lab. Today, the remains are still stored in a few boxes in the Liberal Arts 5 building.
Under the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, the university consulted with the tribe and the remains were repatriated back to the native population in 2000. According to Lipo, repatriation is a consultation process in which remains are returned back to a group of rightful ownership or ancestry.
NAGPRA was established by the National Park Service in 1990 as an act that required any agency, institution or museum that held within their possession human remains, burial associated goods sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony to first to create an inventory of these items, to disclose and to supply those inventories to the tribes of rightful ownership.
“People were caught off guard [when the law passed],” Cindi Alvitre, American Indian Studies professor and member of CSULB’s NAGPRA committee, said. “You had a lot of anthropologists, archaeologists [and] physical anthropologists who have felt that these human remains, all these collections, were their professional property.”
Some university campuses have NAGPRA committees that serve as mediators between all parties involved in a repatriation and reburial. CSULB’s committee is called the Committee on Native American Burial Remains and Cultural Patrimony and is comprised of members of the native community, anthropology department faculty and others recommended by tribal authorities, according to Ron Loewe, a CSULB anthropology professor and committee member.
“It’s a collaboration between local Native American communities and the university,” Brennan said.
The Gabrielino-Tonga group and university agreed to have the remains of the 21 individuals buried on the site to the south of Beach Drive, which is called California Los Angeles site 234.
Site 234 and the large expanse of undeveloped land across the street, site 235, are better known as “Puvungna.” The land is recognized in the National Register of Historic Places as historically significant to the Gabrielino-Tongva as the birthplace of their lawgiver and god, Chinigchinich.
“Puvunga [was] explained to me by elders and others that this was a spiritual center…a place of emergence of a spiritual philosophy that impacted and was associated with many, many California Indian tribes,” Alvitre said.
The field school cannot proceed with the investigation because remains are already buried on their site of choice. A partial body, dated to a similar time period as the site 270 remains, was found on the lower portion of Puvungna, site 235, in 1972 during a dig for a sprinkler line. Those remains were reburied on the upper portion in 1979.
“We are waiting to hear from the state historic preservation office to proceed to make sure that the space that we want to physically do the reburial is clear,” Alvitre said. “[We want to make sure we are] not disturbing anything of significance, that there’s not any other archeological material or cultural resources.”
As of April, the class was cleared to only 10 centimeters of their three-meter depth goal, Lipo said. The site is still untouched save for wooden markers. Lipo is working on recruiting students for a summer field school to continue the reburial process.
“If we ever actually get to do anything with the site, [this is a great opportunity],” Elizabeth Bay, a senior anthropology major in Lipo’s class said.
While they wait for federal approval, the class has been learning about Cultural Resource Management, scanning with different types of equipment to make sure no archaeological material—which includes human remains, artifacts and objects of historical significance—in the subsurface will be disturbed.
According to the website of former CSULB Anthropology professor Gene Ruyle, there are over a dozen archaeological sites within the 500 acres of land surrounding campus. To Alvitre, these are pieces of the “cultural layers” of Long Beach that tell a story about the transformation of the landscape.
Though “Puvungna” is widely considered confined to the land by Bellflower Blvd, Alvitre said that it could have stretched as far as Bolsa Chica and inland to Bellflower.
“You have to erase all these boundaries,” Alvitre said. “As we go back in time you have to deconstruct this whole colonial process, we have to deconstruct the university, we have to deconstruct the agricultural processes that were here. Then we have to deconstruct the rancho period … and go back to earlier times when the village sites existed.”