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Archeologist Nancy A. Whitney-Desautels hasn't a battered fedora to her name, and the corner of Balboa and Ventura boulevards doesn't look much like the Temple of Doom.
Otherwise, the saga of the Lost Village of Encino might suggest a script for Indiana Jones, the peril-a-minute archeologist of the movies.
It has millions of ancient artifacts held hostage, a besieged archeologist, Indians both friendly and angry, and secret sunrise burial rites. There are political maneuvers in Sacramento, millions of dollars at stake, and feuds over arcane points of San Fernando Valley archeology.
The lost village controversy began last year with the discovery of the remains of a long-sought Indian settlement on the southeast corner of Balboa and Ventura boulevards, under the site of a razed restaurant. The excavation yielded 2 million artifacts, which may shed light on how Southern California Indians lived 30 centuries ago.
Controversy Shifts
Now the archeological digging is over; an office building is rising on the site, and the centers of the controversy have shifted to Sacramento and Orange County.
In Sacramento, the state government is in a quandary over the expense of dealing with the troublesome trove of stones, bones and beads. California law requires real estate developers to pay for archeological surveys on potentially significant sites and for the excavation of important finds. That's the source of the lost village project. But the law makes no provision for preserving, analyzing and storing artifacts once they are out of the ground.
In Orange County, Desautels, the Huntington Beach archeologist who headed the excavation, is holding on to a warehouse stacked with bags of artifacts. She says she will not release them until somebody pays her bill for labor, artifact analysis and other expenses.
It is around Desautels, an outspoken 36-year-old woman who moves confidently among power brokers in real estate, politics and archeology, that much of the controversy revolves.
$1.7-Million Excavation
Desautels, who has a 1979 doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, is the president of an archeological firm named Scientific Resource Surveys Inc. She persuaded the developers of the Encino building site, First Financial Group Inc., to pay many times what they were obliged by law to pay at the site. It turned out to be one of the...