Skull discovery halts work at Knik

KNIK — Work to build a foundation for a historical warehouse in Knik has been halted after a skull was found in the dirt being removed.

Fran Seager-Boss, cultural resource specialist for the Mat-Su Borough, said the skull was found two weeks ago and that since then no work has been done at the site. The project was to build a foundation on which to set a warehouse O.G. Herning built in 1917 that was moved to the area from Wasilla.

“We’re all just sort of suspended right now,” she said. “As soon as any skeletal remains were recovered from this operation we ceased immediately.”

Who the skull belonged to, when he or she died, whether he or she was white or Native, is yet to be determined. Seager-Boss said the State Medical Examiner’s Office is conducting an investigation to find those answers.

The area where the skull was found is near the Knik Museum. It’s an area rich in history with multiple buried Native townsites. The museum itself is the last remaining piece of the old Knik Townsite.

Since the area has multiple former settlements, members of the Knik Tribal Council had been watching the digging. They wanted to make sure just this sort of thing didn’t happen.

“That’s the worst possible thing to have happen because that’s somebody’s soul,” said Debra Call, president of the Knik Tribal Council.    

It’s a battle the tribe has fought before, Call said. Nobody consulted them when Knik-Goose Bay Road was put almost directly through the townsite. The tribe had to fight to install fencing around a graveyard the Iditarod Trail runs through.

Alfred Theodore, one of the tribal council’s elders, lives across the street from the site. He said that one of the reasons his father worked to get the land for the tribe was its remoteness.

“We didn’t want someone to dig us up and move us,” he said. “Things like this make me feel bad... We respect our dead.”

This go-round, Call said, all due care was taken to make sure no bodies were disturbed. She noted that prior to the dig a team came out with ground-penetrating radar to look for burial sites. Some burial sites were found, but not where the skull was eventually unearthed.

“The skull has the same shape and reads the same as a rock,” she said. “They were looking for coffin shapes.”

Only after the site was surveyed with the radar, she said, was a decision made to move ahead. She said it seemed reasonable to dig there because the Dena’ina wouldn’t have put a burial ground on such swampy land.

“I didn’t have any reason to believe there was anything there,” she said.

Another issue — this might not be the first time the skull was moved. The area where they were digging, Seager-Boss said, had a layer of fill on top of the original ground. The fill came from another construction project.

“We couldn’t tell whether it came from the fill or whether it came from the subsurface,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.