Soul Food:

On the first Saturday of this month Susana Salas walked out to what once was a large prehistoric village and its cemetery near Warner Avenue and Bolsa Chica Street. It was her first visit to the place since luxury homes with views of the Pacific coast and Huntington Beach wetlands were built atop it.

She felt anxious, she said, her voice beginning to catch. This had been the home, then the resting place, of her ancestors; three decades of trying hadn’t prevented them from being disturbed.

The story isn’t a new one or even exceptional except for the rare artifacts found at the site known as ORA-83. Ed Mountford, chief executive of Hearthside Homes, which is building the 356-home gated community known as Brightwater, has said that nearly all of Orange County’s most coveted coastal dwelling places were once home to indigenous California Indians.

Which together with the unique discoveries at this site might seem like the best reason of all to preserve rather than build on it. Few, if any, like it are left.

An 8,000-year-old village, it once encompassed 17 acres on the Bolsa Chica Mesa. Along with 174 human remains and tens of thousands of artifacts, more than 1,000 stone carvings known as cogged stones have been found there.

The site is thought to have been a manufacturing and distribution center for the stones, part of a complex, interactive ritual associated with a now unknown religion. Only a small number of other cogged stones, which resemble cogged wheels, have been found at a 9,000-year-old indigenous site on the northern coast of Chile.

The idea that the stones have an archaeoastronomical, ceremonial and ritual significance — along the lines of the much larger stones found at Stonehenge — became a crippling point of contention in attempts to win ORA-83 a place on the National Register of Historic Places. Several of the staff on the California Department of Parks and Recreation State Historical Resources Commission just wouldn’t have it.

Never mind that Tom Hoskinson, an aerospace engineer with expertise in Native American sky watching practices, calendars and mathematics, supported the notion. Never mind that Commissioner Carol L. Novey pointed out that as Westerners, commission staff might “simply not understand the ideas put forth in the nomination.”