Solar panels built on Ohlone burial ground near Highway 87

Santa Clara County officials may have jumped the gun by allowing solar panels to be installed on a field just west of the Guadalupe Parkway without first checking to see if it contains the remains and artifacts of an Ohlone Indian tribe. Records at San Jose State University show the site was documented as a tribal burial ground in 1973.

Alerted by the Resident about those records, the county consulted with an archeologist who confirmed the solar panel field is a burial ground, and officials now are taking steps to ensure any remains won’t be disturbed.

When Almaden Valley resident and retired Caltrans engineer Sam Wang read a story in the Resident about the solar panel project and drove by the site, he wondered whether the county was building there without proper clearance. Wang, who oversaw the widening of Highway 87 in the early 2000s, said in an interview that an archaeologist told him the site between the Capitol Expressway and Branham Lane should never be built on because of its history.

“I learned it from an archaeologist, that area is Indian burial ground,” Wang said. “I told my contractors, never, never touch the land.

“So I was surprised the last time I drove by, wow, who’s the one who built the huge solar farm out there? Did they get environmental clearance?” he said. “Indian burial ground is sacred land; we all know that we’re not supposed to touch it, and as a highway engineer, I know that. Any cemetery, even a pet cemetery, we need to detour to avoid it.”

Asked whether the county knew about the burial ground before approving the solar panel project, Dave Snow, deputy director of the county’s facilities and fleet department, said there was “a ton of disturbance of the earth” there dating back to the 1980s and the county didn’t find any public record of prehistoric or human remains.

“It would never be our intent to gloss over anything of cultural significance,” Snow said. “We can only operate on the information we have. The Ohlone were all over the valley, but there is nothing in the information, research or public outreach that we did with the county that would tell us there’s something culturally significant.”

But Alan Leventhal, an archaeologist at San Jose State University who has worked with the Muwekma Ohlone tribe for 30 years, says such documentation exists. He procured archival records of an archaeological survey of the solar field conducted in September 1973 by five people from West Valley College. The documents include a map of the burial site that matches the location of the solar panels, as well as a detailed inventory of various artifacts and human remains found in the same area. After examining the county’s California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) report, Leventhal said it did not demonstrate “an adequate archaeological or cultural resource management review.”

“It’s just not a report, as far as I can tell, that meets standards under CEQA,” he said.

Although the county referenced a 2010 report from Archaeological Resource Management before approving another solar panel site–near Malech Road in south San Jose–Leventhal said that the report makes it look “like they did nothing” about the Highway 87 site.

“They’re not revealing anything on any evidence,” he added. “They do maintain that a cultural resource evaluation was conducted in 2010 for improvements from Malech to Lodge [Court], but nothing near Highway 87. There is no mention other than they’re saying there will be no impact.”

Leventhal said the county should have first consulted Northwest Information Center at Sonoma State University, which has records of all the Native American archaeological sites throughout California. He said the center usually conducts an archival literature search and often follows up with an on-site survey to visually scout for evidence of remains or artifacts such as pestles, flake tools and baked clay.

County planning and development director Kirk Girard acknowledged that his department did not consult the center but said it did impose a condition that construction must stop if anything culturally significant is found at six solar panel sites throughout the county.

“We did this evaluation at the same time we evaluated five other solar panel installations, and we did the evaluation as a mitigated negative declaration under CEQA,” Girard said. “There was one site of the six that was in a rural area that was effectively undisturbed, and so our CEQA specialist did research to determine if there was archaeological artifacts. We did not find anything through Northwest Center and did not ask for reports for the other five sites including the Guadalupe Parkway site, but after reading the report on the [Malech Road] site, he did have concerns.”

The specialist proposed a condition that “effectively says that you have to observe any digging or ground disturbing activities” if anything is discovered, Girard said.

“We do consult Northwest any time we think there’s a potential for encountering human remains,” he added. “It was a combination of shallow excavations immediately adjacent to the freeway and a presumption that the area had been disturbed prior and that there wasn’t a potential to disturb remains.”

The project description indicates that excavation would be limited to 3 feet and the solar panels would be installed by driving piles rather than digging, which Girard said shouldn’t affect anything buried below too much. Based on these factors and the county’s original site research, he said the CEQA specialist felt it was OK to proceed.

“The research that [the CEQA specialist] did on Guadalupe Parkway was associated with the potential for asbestos at that location because of fill earth,” he said. “The excavation from the freeway was deposited at that location. His sense is that because the trenching that had to be done was so shallow, it didn’t have the potential to affect any archaeological remains, so that was a sufficient condition to impose.”

Girard said an archaeologist from Basin Research Associates that the county contacted after the Resident began asking questions confirmed there’s evidence of a burial ground at the site and recommended measures to avoid disturbing the subsurface.

Girard said a trench has been dug immediately adjacent to a fence along the freeway and boring samples will be taken.

“What we’re going to do is have a physical anthropologist look at the exposed trench and be there for any further digging to make sure we don’t encounter anything,” Girard said. “We’re going to determine how much fill was placed on the property. The [Basin] report on that site says it was built on 27 feet of fill and that that entire Caltrans right-of-way was built prior to the installation of the freeway.”

The county also is reviewing Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority records to determine how much fill is on the site. If the 27-foot estimate is confirmed, Girard said the potential for disturbing any remains or artifacts should be minimal, although there still will be an on-site anthropologist keeping an eye on things.

“Those are the two areas that we decided to move on,” he said. “We want to be sure we’re being as proactive as possible; an anthropologist there is considered the best mitigation.”

[This article was originally published by the Mercury News in 2016.]