It sounds like the premise of a bad horror movie, but the Washington State Department of Transportation has discovered that the Hood Canal bridge was built on top of a native American burial ground.

The excavation inadvertently unearthed Tse-whit-zen, the largest prehistoric Indian village ever discovered in Washington, portions of which date back more than 1,700 years.
With each shovel of dirt, the state and tribe have come to realize what they are grappling with. One of Washington's largest transportation projects is amid the region's richest archaeological site, including an ancient cemetery.
Excavation has desecrated grave after grave, including 264 intact human skeletons so far, and more than 700 isolates, or bone fragments. The remains reveal statements of rank, of love and grief: shamans dusted with red ochre; couples buried with limbs intertwined; mass graves, signaling smallpox.
More than 5,000 artifacts have surfaced, including blanket pins fashioned in the shapes of animals; a stone rake for harvesting herring; hand tools; even the intact, sacrificial remains of sea otters offered to the spirit world.

There's a fair bit of religious hokum in the article; goofy stuff such as the claim that pouring a concrete slab would trap the spirits forever (piling dirt and rocks on top of them doesn't, apparently, nor does rotting into a smear), and spiritual advisors on site and ritual anointings to protect people from angry spirits. That's all baloney, but still, the amazing thing is that the state is just barreling ahead with the project. They've got this unique archaeological site, and the construction equipment is tearing through it all.

"I know of no publicly funded project in the United States that has continued with this many graves," said David Rice, senior archeologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Seattle District. "There is no end in sight, and we are approaching 1,000. Most sites I know of that found as many as 30 burials were stopped in their tracks.
"This is unprecedented in the United States."
Bones have been inadvertently hauled to the dump and left on construction spoil, split in half by excavators and crumbled as they were dragged across the bottoms of ditches with excavating equipment. Skulls have been shattered, and the remains of families that were buried together have been scattered.

The religious/spiritual crap cuts no ice with me, but I'm still on the side of the native Americans here: this ought to stop. To my mind, there are two really solid reasons to be irate at this desecration by the state government:

• The casual destruction of an immense piece of native American cultural heritage is an insult to the descendants of the people who lived there. It's a declaration that this piece of history was unimportant and can be bulldozed at will…just as we bulldozed through the living tribes to set up our own culture.
• While I am confident that 'spirits' are nonexistent, there is something very, very real at this site: knowledge and history. We're throwing that away. And that is something that really pisses me off.

What I really don't understand, though, is why this project hasn't slammed to a complete stop while everyone reassesses and replans and tries to come up with a new solution. I know, follow the money—and the tribes have very little while the commercial interests that want the bridge do—but this is such an egregious example of cultural demolition that you'd think there'd be much more public concern.

(via Eclecticism)