Tse-whit-zen: The Village Beneath the Waterfront

In the summer of two thousand three, construction crews broke ground on the Port Angeles waterfront for a dry dock intended to service the replacement Hood Canal Bridge. Within days the excavators struck bone. Then more bone.

By the time the digging stopped, archaeologists had uncovered the remains of more than three hundred and thirty-five people and more than ten thousand artifacts from a Klallam village that had stood on this ground for somewhere between seventeen hundred and twenty-seven hundred years. The village was called Tse-whit-zen, and it is the largest pre-European-contact archaeological site ever excavated in the state of Washington. The finds included the remains of longhouse structures, tools, shells, and trade goods from the early contact period of the seventeen eighties and nineties, showing evidence of European goods and of the devastating epidemic diseases that arrived with them.

Some burials held multiple people, several dusted with red ochre in what archaeologists believe was ritual preparation for the afterlife. Washington State halted all construction on the site in December of two thousand four. The remains were eventually repatriated to the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe.

The city of Port Angeles, it turned out, was built directly on top of a civilization. The waterfront streets above Tse-whit-zen hold no marker adequate to the discovery, but the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has not forgotten what lies below.