Tribal secretary Amanda Barrera described it as a painful visit.

Inside a San Diego storage room, hundreds of Indian artifacts – many of them broken – were displayed on folding tables. Hundreds more appeared to be tucked away in boxes.

The relics, dug up by giant earthmovers during construction of the Genesis solar plant in eastern Riverside County, included metates and manos – stone tools used to grind seeds into meal. Many other tools used by ancient people to hunt, gather and prepare food near the now buried shores of Ford Dry Lake about 25 miles west of Blythe also were unearthed.

“It was pretty disturbing and destructive,” said Barrera, a member of the governing council of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, a nation of about 4,000 people with ancestry from the Mohave, Chemehuevi, Hopi and Navajo peoples.

Barrera and other tribal members viewed artifacts last year after getting permission from the project’s developers, she said.

The somber visit came after the tribes lost a battle with the Bureau of Land Management to get the developer of the 1,950-acre Genesis plant to bypass a 125-acre area where most of the nearly 3,000 artifacts from the solar-plant site were found.

The artifacts include 364 metates and metate fragments; 277 manos, the handheld grinding tool used with metates; 69 hammer stones; and 63 flake tools, including projectile points and scrapers; 122 stone cores and 786 flakes from tool making.

Many of the artifacts, some of which might date 10,000 years, appeared to have been broken in an instant by the machinery used to dig them up.

The tribes want possession of the artifacts so they can be returned to the desert to restore the footprints of their ancestry.

An investigation by The Press-Enterprise found that the Obama administration’s push to quickly approve and subsidize big solar projects on public land resulted in the destruction of land that tribes contend once housed an ancient lakeside village inhabited by the Mohave people.

Bypassing the 125 acres, records show, was deemed too costly and technically difficult for the developers, Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, which also owns Florida Power & Light, the nation’s third-largest electric utility.

So, despite the objections of Native Americans, federal officials let earthmovers plow through the desolate site during the summer of 2012. A drainage channel and solar mirror arrays are there now.

RELATED: ‘Fast track’ project approvals left tribes behind

Only an area the size of a table – thought to be a cremation site – was left undisturbed.

To make up for the archaeological losses, Next-Era was required to spend $3 million on measures that included an ethnographic study of the area and scholarships for Native American students.

The $1.2 billion Genesis solar plant is hailed as a success story in the Obama administration’s effort to reduce the nation’s reliance on foreign oil and combat climate change. It was highly subsidized with tax credits that covered 30 percent of the cost, plus more than $800 million in federal loan guarantees that put the project’s financial risk on taxpayers.

Genesis went into full operation last year. It can generate enough electricity for about 88,000 California homes.

NextEra officials declined to be interviewed for this story.

UNANTICIPATED FIND

The Genesis plant was built in an area of the Sonoran Desert that native people had traveled for thousands of years. The site is along an ancient trade route that linked tribes that lived by the Colorado River with those living by the coast.

Grading the 3 square miles of previously undisturbed desert-creosote-bush scrub lands was expected to unearth some artifacts, according to environmental reports prepared prior to the project’s approval in 2010.

But disruption of cultural sites was not expected because the project was designed to avoid potential archaeological sites, the reports say.

During the first months of construction in 2011, dozens of artifacts were found scattered throughout the project’s landscape as expected. None of the finds was deemed significant, according to BLM records.

But on Nov. 17, 2011, a grading cut exposed something unanticipated. Two large, flat metates were found together overturned in a layer of charcoal soil.

Archaeologists hired by NextEra described the find as a possible cremation site.

A Mohave Indian tradition is for a deceased person to be cremated with his or her most important possessions, such as metates, said David Harper, a Colorado River Indian Tribes member who serves as spokesman for Mohave elders. And two metates found together is a sign of the departed person’s wealth.

The archaeologists dug trenches nearby, turning up more and more artifacts. The cache included dozens of metates and manos, as well as several hammer-stones, scrapers, a stone pendant and an Olivella seashell bead – indication of contact with coastal people.

Construction was halted in the 125-acre “exclusion zone” because of the high density of artifacts.

ANCIENT LAKE

What’s more, records show that the high concentration of artifacts was discovered near the buried, ancient shoreline of what is now Ford Dry Lake, one of Southern California’s ephemeral lakes – big basins that fill up with water during wetter, cooler times, then dry up in times of drought.

Over the eons, these lakes held water for periods ranging from a decade to a century, said Matthew Hall, a UC Riverside archaeologist who has expertise in California desert sites.

When filled, these lakes offered Native Americans game such as ducks and other waterfowl. The associated wetlands also provided habitat for grain-producing plants, including wild rice, Hall said.

And the lake was not far from washes with mesquite thickets. The desert shrub offers beanlike seeds that were eaten by Native Americans – once they were ground into a flour with metates and manos.

Village life by a lake is described in the Mohave’s traditional songs that have been passed down over generations, Harper said.

The artifacts’ discovery in November 2011 compelled Bureau of Land Management officials to consult tribal representatives.

In a Dec. 6, 2011, conference call, BLM and company representatives shared the discovery with representatives from the Colorado River, Fort Mojave, Soboba and Quechan tribes.

Linda Otero, director of the Aha Makav Cultural Society and a member of the Fort Mojave tribe, pointed out that the stone pendant could have been from a funeral or cremation, according to minutes of the meeting.

She and the other tribal representatives asked NextEra to avoid and preserve the 125 acres.

But a NextEra official told them it was “commercial reality” that the project could not be made smaller. “We were all aware of potential finds,” he said, according to the minutes.

The tribes then launched a bureaucratic and legal battle that ended when a court ruled against them six months later, allowing the 125 acres to be developed.

During this time, Next-Era had direct access to then-U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who was in charge of the Obama administration’s push to put big wind and solar projects on public lands.

Salazar and NextEra chairman Lewis “Lew” Hay III participated in a February 2012 conference call, according to government emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Salazar, now an attorney in Denver, did not return calls seeking further details. Hay, now an investment adviser, could not be reached.

But NextEra laid out its arguments in a March 23 letter to the BLM that said avoiding the site would be too costly and technically infeasible.

The Genesis plant, about 25 miles west of Blythe, uses nearly 620,000 curved mirrors to capture the sun’s heat to make steam that turns turbines to create electricity.

Changes to the system, the letter said, would upset an optimal balance that took thousands of engineering hours to achieve.

“A portion of a solar field cannot simply be eliminated or relocated without a significant negative impact to the plant’s operability, output, thermal efficiency, performance, costs, and schedule,” the letter said.

The letter also said major design changes could jeopardize the use of $852 million in loans that were guaranteed with tax dollars by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Loss of loan guarantees would have forced NextEra to invest more of its own money to keep the project on track, it said.

“The loss of debt facilities would require Genesis to fund 100 percent of the project costs with equity, thereby forfeiting the economic benefit of a leveraged return,” said the letter by Michael O’Sullivan, the vice president of Genesis Solar, the NextEra subsidiary for the project.

Ultimately, John Kalish, the BLM’s Palm Springs field manager, decided to allow the 125 acres to be developed.

Kalish said he was never pressured by Salazar.

He acknowledged the site was used intermittently over the eons by Native Americans to gather and process food, but said the archaeological site wasn’t significant enough to preserve.

He said they could not just change the layout of the project site because it already was hemmed in by protected wildlife areas and other potential archaeological sites.

BLM officials, he said, found no conclusive evidence of habitation, human remains or funerals.

“It never came up to a level of an archaeological resource that we felt very clearly should be avoided,” Kalish said in an interview. “We just never reached that particular threshold.”

Barrera said the BLM’s threshold didn’t take into account the Mohave culture. The Mohave people cremated their dead and burned the deceased person’s possessions and homes, which were made from wood.

So only the stone artifacts were left behind, she said.

Kalish said it was never determined whether the two metates in the charcoal were from a cremation site, because the site was never excavated and analyzed. The table-size area was avoided at the request of the tribes, because they believed it to be sacred.

So in May 2012, Kalish signed papers that allowed construction to resume in the 125-acre zone.

At the same time, the BLM and state energy officials required NextEra to spend $3 million on measures that include an ethnographic study of the area, scholarships for Native American students, an analysis of artifacts removed from the site, and the development of websites and educational materials explaining the culture of the area.

Dennis Patch, chairman of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, described the situation as absurd, saying the decision amounted to destroying the site and then studying it later.

That same May, the tribes took their case to U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

They argued that the site was a sacred part of their tribal identity, and that BLM hadn’t properly followed federal laws that protect such cultural resources.

The site of the plant had been “part of our people since, as we say, time immemorial,” Harper, a tribal member, said in a court deposition.

The metates had special spiritual significance.

“The metates represent that women were ever-present and that they kept the people together,” his deposition says. “Women kept the tribe from starving and sustained us in the harsh lands. … Without this tool, there was no mesquite bean to grind or no way to make and store our food.

“These items are sacred to our people. To harm these items would harm and disrupt the spirit of which this item was placed in a sacred ceremony for the dead. It is the same as a grave robber or someone who would disrupt a grave in a graveyard. …

“Not anyone can come and bother these stones. They are sacred and part of the dead. … Touching the metate can make you have nightmares and dream ungodly things. When you touch the dead, it can also cause harm to your family, especially the young, sickly and elderly,” Harper said in the deposition.

District Judge George H. Wu wanted more information. He ordered trenches to be dug, which unearthed six more artifacts, including a mano, a mano fragment and a metate fragment.

Wu’s final decision noted that this additional digging found no evidence of residential structures, cremation or funerals.

His denial of the tribes’ request for a restraining order also pointed out that the project’s environmental study, a 1,539-page document prepared before the solar plant was approved, said that such artifacts were expected to be found.

The tribes failed to show they would suffer irreparable harm, Wu’s decision said.

So in June 2012, the BLM let giant earthmovers, known as “belly scrapers,” grade the site.

Of the 2,976 artifacts gathered from the Genesis project site, two-thirds came from the 125-acre contested site, and most of those – 1,198 – were found after construction resumed, according to BLM figures.

Kalish emphasized that the gathering of artifacts during construction followed scientific protocols, which included recording the GPS coordinates of where each artifact was found, taking digital photographs and digging deeper whenever several artifacts were found close together.

Kalish acknowledged the grading machinery broke many of the artifacts.

“Materials were broken with the graders, and they used these belly scrapers,” Kalish said at BLM offices in Moreno Valley. “You know, when the blade would hit the material, some of the artifacts were broken, certainly.”

In April 2014, NextEra, federal and state officials celebrated the Genesis plant’s opening. Several dignitaries took turns posing for photographs next to a 6-foot-tall replica of a household light switch that signified they were switching on a new era of clean power.

There was no mention of the archaeological site.

About a month later, a contingent of Colorado River tribal leaders and elders traveled to the San Diego storage room to view the artifacts gathered from the Genesis site.

The relics are held by consultants hired by Next-Era. Plans are to move them to the San Bernardino County Museum for permanent storage. Officials have not made clear when the move will occur.

The ethnographic study and other mitigation measures were scheduled to be completed in 2013. But the work still hasn’t been finished, so it hasn’t been made public, Kalish said.

And even though the area was declared not archaeologically significant enough to save, the BLM is preparing an application to add the site and surrounding Ford Dry Lake area to the National Register of Historic Places.

The area is expected to qualify as a historic site because it contains important information about prehistoric life, Kalish said.

“The general public really doesn’t understand the importance of these resources,” he said.

Contact the reporter: ddanelski@pe.com, 951-368-9471