Knik grave examined

KNIK — After finding a human skull in dirt being removed in an excavation project, the Mat-Su Borough says it has since found the rest of the skeleton and plans to rebury it in a nearby Native cemetery.

According to a borough press release, the excavation work was part of a project to build a foundation for a historic warehouse behind the Knik Museum. The warehouse dates to 1917 and was once owned by O.G. Herning, a storied Knik businessman. It was moved from Wasilla to Knik 18 years ago.

The Wasilla-Knik Historical Society, working with a borough bed-tax grant, planned to house some of its artifacts in the warehouse once it was moved from the skids it currently sits on to the new foundation.

The skull was found in mid-August and work stopped immediately, according to the press release.

Knik Tribal Council President Debra Call said in August the situation was the last thing anybody — especially the tribe — wanted to have happen. But the tribe had worked with the borough leading up to dirt being moved and was satisfied the area had been sufficiently surveyed.

She said the tribe supervised borough efforts to use ground-penetrating radar and reviewed the results. That survey did turn up other gravesites, but nothing in the area where the skull was eventually unearthed.

“You never want to do that, so we did everything so we could to keep that from happening,” Call said in a previous interview.

Fran Seager-Boss, the borough’s cultural resource specialist, said in August the borough was looking for coffin shapes in the radar.

“That’s the best we can do. We don’t have the money to come in here with five archaeologists and dig through all this,” she said.

When the skull turned up, it still wasn’t immediately apparent that the excavation had hit a grave.

The area behind the museum was swampland until it was filled with dirt removed from a different construction project. The skull could have been mixed in with that fill.

And, Call said in the press release, a swamp isn’t generally a good place for a graveyard.

“It’s a possibility the person was buried after the town faded. If the person died in the winter the person may have been buried by women and children because the men were out hunting,” she said. “This would have resulted in a shallow grave behind a building.”

On Monday, the borough announced that since the skull was found, workers began looking for the rest of the remains. On Sept. 19, the rest of the bones turned up and work was halted again. A state archaeologist has determined the skeleton is likely that of a Native man in his early 20s who died 75 to 100 years ago. Rather than placed in a coffin, the body was wrapped in birch bark and wood, the borough said.

The borough’s press release noted that when the museum was a pool hall in the 1900s, the area behind it was a well-traveled alleyway. And the area where the body was found may have been a trash dump. Workers digging the foundation removed nine 5-gallon buckets of trash — broken glass from champagne, vinegar, medicine, condiment and soda bottles.

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