Catherine Gabe
Plain Dealer Reporter

"Great Spirit, watch over this sacred site. Our ancestors sleep here. Continue to work with us and help everyone remain calm."

After Joyce Mahaney spoke those words Wednesday, she sprinkled tobacco, sage, cedar and sweetgrass on soils near Sandusky Bay where ancient remains were discovered last week.

Three tribal elders joined Mahaney, president of the Native American Inter´ tribal Association in Toledo. They prayed quietly at the private ceremony.

The artifacts and human bones were unearthed when a developer began to build a housing complex. With them came questions about how best to preserve Ohio's sacred sites.

State laws don't protect excavations like this one in Danbury Township. The developer has cooperated and reached an agreement with archaeologists, Native Americans and government agencies, but he has no obligation to any of them.

"What would help a great deal is if we could get some kind of legislation," said Brian Redmond, curator of archaeology with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. "Indiana has excellent laws. You need a permit to do any kind of digging, even on private property."

Redmond walked the land a week ago and said some artifacts could date to 2500 B.C. The museum has offered to curate the artifact collection found at the site, which he said is probably a prehistoric village, perhaps a hunting encampment where people lived on a seasonal basis. Families might have used old home sites as trash pits.

He estimates the early residents left about 1600 A.D., before contact with Europeans. The circumstances of their departure remain a mystery, since they left no written record, Redmond said. Bits of flint and arrowheads point to aggression and warfare, he said.

“Where they went we don’t know. We have not been able to trace them,” Redmond said.

This week, Arthur Medicine Eagle demanded a public apology after amateur archaeologists placed bones in a Jack Daniels Whiskey box, before they were sent for evaluation.

“It’s legalized grave robbing,” said Medicine Eagle, a leader with the Five States Alliance of First Americans.

After local newspapers and television stations captured that image, it was relayed to Native Americans across the country, Medicine Eagle said. “You have no idea what that did in the Indian community,” he said.

“We have people watching all the time. We get ahold of one another. And it’s not through smoke signals, either. We use e-mail.”

Medicine Eagle called developer Greg Spatz. Without pickets or demonstration, the two struck a gentlemen’s agreement. Spatz told the amateur archaeologists to stop digging and hired a professional archaeologist, who begins work Monday.

The remains will be documented, collected and reburied in a space on the private development near a family cemetery of early settlers.

“I have his word,” Medicine Eagle said Tuesday from his home in Indianapolis.

Yesterday, Medicine Eagle was in Danbury Township. He wore his ribbon shirt, to honor those still on their journey, and walked the grounds with his son. Without reporters.

“We shed a few tears for our ancestors, laid tobacco and cedar,” he said on his cell phone en

route to his home after the ceremony.

“We smoked a ceremonial pipe for our ancestors and asked our creator to protect the area so it’s not a circus environment. There was no hokeypokey. We just said prayers.”

Medicine Eagle spoke with the amateur archaeologists and received his apology.

It’s likely that more prehistoric remains could be found on another private housing development adjacent to the Spatz’s. “They say prayer is far reaching and we have been told the developer there will work with us,” Medicine Eagle said.