Doug Stanglin

USA TODAY

An ancient American Indian burial ground and village dating back 4,500 years was found in California's Marin County and quietly destroyed to make way for a multimillion-dollar housing development, the San Francisco Chroniclereports.

Archaeologists tell the newspaper that a 300-foot-long site in Larkspur contained Coast Miwok life from before the time of King Tut's tomb, including 600 human burials, tools, musical instruments and harpoon tips along with bones of bears and a ceremonial California condor burial.

Not a single artifact was saved, Chronicle staff writer Peter Fimrite reports.

"This was a site of considerable archaeological value," Dwight Simons, a consulting archaeologist who analyzed 7,200 bones, tells the Chronicle. "My estimate of bones and fragments in the entire site was easily over a million, and probably more than that. It was staggering."

The newspaper says all of the items were reburied in an undisclosed location at the site north of San Francisco and apparently graded over.

The $55 million development project will include a mix of homes, from senior housing units to single-family dwellings selling for $2.5 million.

As required by law, developers brought in archaeological experts to excavate the site and the work was monitored by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, who were designated the most likely descendants of the indigenous people in the area.

Because the work was carried out under a non-disclosure agreement, word of the find was not widely known until some of the archaeologists discussed their work at a Society for California Archaeology symposium in March.

The American Indian leaders ultimately decided how the findings would be handled, and defended their decision to remove and rebury the human remains and burial artifacts.

"Our policy is that those things belong to us, end of story," Greg Sarris, the chairman for the 1,300-member tribe, tells the Chronicle. "Let us worry about our own preservation. If we determine that they are sacred objects, we will rebury them because in our tradition many of those artifacts, be they beads, charm stones or whatever, go with the person who died. ... How would Jewish or Christian people feel if we wanted to dig up skeletal remains in a cemetery and study them? Nobody has that right."

Archaeologist Simons says he believes developers were behind keeping it secret to avoid any comparison to the 1982 movie Poltergeist in which a family was tormented by ghosts and demons because their house was built on top of a burial ground.