Indian Remains at New Good Earth Site

Residents who know the area may not be shocked to find out Native American remains are buried right under our feet. But, those remains came as a surprise to construction crews working on the new building at Fair-Anselm Plaza.

In mid-June, the town of Fairfax was notified that the construction work was taking place on what might be an archeologically-sensitive site. Work was halted and an archeologist was brought in, said Larry Kennings, a planner with the town, to see if there was really anything there.

“We had a look and said ‘oh man, there is something there,’” said John Holson, an archeologist with Pacific Legacy, who was hired first by the town and then by Good Earth to monitor the site.

What was there was midden and shell mounds and four small fragments of bone.

Midden is a dark soil, commonly associated with long-ago waste products. “Imagine you threw everything out your window for 60 years,” said Holson.

The midden at the construction site was very shallow and mixed throughout the area with dirt. It had likely been disturbed, said Holson, when the original store was built in 1959.

In fact, said Al Baylacq, one of the owners of Good Earth, a neighbor said he remembered playing in the dirt piles as a kid when the original construction took place 50 years ago and finding pottery pieces, tools and shells.

All those archeological remains remained underground at the store, with no one the wiser, for decades until construction work began on the new Good Earth store earlier this year.

“It’s not common, but it happens,” said Holson, who worked before as an archeologist for CalTrans.

Once the Good Earth partners, LRG Capital – who owns Fair-Anselm, and the town were aware of the archeological sensitivity of the site, it was a relatively straight-forward process to take the necessary steps.

Pacific Legacy studied the site and recommended monitoring, less invasive technology and controlled sampling. The Federated Indians of Graton Racheria were consulted as representatives of the most likely living descendants of the Native Americans who lived in this area and requested that everything found simply be treated with respect, not photographed, and put back in the ground. Even the Marin County Coroner’s Officer got involved in mid-July to verify that the four bone fragments (a small piece of cranium, small fragments of shaft and a long bone fragment) were not from any recent deaths.

Coming up with that plan, though, took 24 days before it was finalized and approved by the council, during which no construction was done. The stop work order was lifted on July 6 and work restarted on July 7, said Kennings

That 24-day delay, in what was initially a 180-day work schedule, has pushed back the opening of the new store.

See the renderings of what the new Good Earth store will look like .

The earliest the contractors said they would be done was the first week of December, said Baylacq, but the owners didn’t want to open the new store during the holidays and so will most likely wait until Jan. 10.

The delay, said Baylacq, has had large financial implications for LRG Capital and for Good Earth.

“But, once you kind of get over that, it’s a pretty cool thing,” said Baylacq of the archeological findings. “I’ve had a chance to reflect back on the history of the area, reflect back and imagine what was here before.”