A treasure-trove of trash.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

JOHN DAY - They emerge from the dirt as fragments of porcelain and glass or rusty bits of metal, dull to the eye but wrapped in the patina of history.

They once were teacups or opium tins or markers used in games, but to University of Oregon archaeologist Julie Schablitsky and her colleagues, they are parts of a story. For six hot, painstaking days this summer they carefully dug through several feet of earth and stones in a John Day park, looking for relics left by turn-of-the-century Chinese miners and laborers who for a time called Eastern Oregon their home.

"What we're trying to do is give the voiceless a voice," Schablitsky said while shuttling from one shallow pit to another, watching the work slowly progress. "The Chinese of this time period didn't have a chance to have a voice in the history of this area. We're an interpreter of that past."

The dig is centered on the Kam Wah Chung & Co. building in John Day, itself a relic of different times and a voice from the past. Now a museum, the building was once the center of a busy Chinatown where 1,000 or more Asian residents at times outnumbered Caucasians in what was then a remote outpost in the Oregon frontier. The building survived surprisingly intact, leaving a vivid memoir of two of the region's leading Chinese residents and a way of life that could be its own chapter in American history. But little is known of the surrounding community.

That's what brought Schablitsky and about a half-dozen colleagues to John Day. During their weeklong search they turned up dozens of bits of history that should help them add to the story of Eastern Oregon's Chinese community.

"What we want to come away with is a better understanding not only of Kam Wah Chung, but also the John Day Chinatown," she said. "A lot is known about Kam Wah Chung, but not much is known about the Chinatown in which it sat."

The dig is part of the master planning effort for the Kam Wah Chung state heritage site, one of the most popular tourist draws in Grant County. Future plans for the site include a new visitors center, and the dig will help establish where it can be built with the least damage to cultural remains.

Not surprisingly, most of what was found was cast-offs. Little emerged whole; most of the artifacts were broken china or crockery, pieces of medicine bottles or opium pipes. Lots of nails, a padlock and key, the metal frame of a coin purse and other flotsam filled several boxes.

About the only things to come out whole were a few clear-glass beer and whiskey bottles.

To be honest, most of what was found is simply trash. But trash is an honest storyteller; it's an archaeological diary, uninfluenced by spin or politics or power.

"Virtually never do archaeologists find a chest of hidden gold," said Paul Baxter, one of the team members on the dig. "It's almost all garbage, because no one is thinking about what they're throwing away. It contains a much more unbiased view."

That's part of why they find things such as opium tins and pipes. Opium was a big part of Chinese medicine and culture at the turn of the century and was legal to use in this country until 1905.

And trash or not, these are still artifacts from a much older and much different time, and finding them still carries the thrill of discovery.

"To hold something in your hand that hasn't seen the light of day in 100, 150 years is just incredible," said Marie Pokrant, a New Orleans archaeologist who met Schablitsky there while working on a FEMA project and spent her vacation working the Kam Wah Chung dig. "We're here for the information this potentially represents."

Images of Indiana Jones aside, it's not glamorous work. The Kam Wah Chung building sits near Canyon Creek on ground that was thoroughly dredged and churned by gold seekers, burying the historical treasures underneath a jumble of cobble-size stones.

Digging through it, on the first 90-degree days of the year, is hard work. It starts with shovels, maybe even a backhoe, before getting down to small trowels and even dental picks and paintbrushes as the bits of history begin to emerge.

Every shovelful of dirt has to be sifted through a shaker screen and carefully picked apart. Of the half-dozen pits, some were loaded with relics, some less so.

"Every time you move the trowel, artifacts pop out," said Nancy Niedernhofer, cultural resources coordinator for the state parks department, as she watched dirt being sifted at one of the pits.

The project was the talk of the town during its weeklong run in late June. It drew a steady stream of curious locals and tourists, and the diggers happily took time to explain the work and their finds despite being a little surprised at the attention.

"This is the sexy part of archaeology, which might tell you something about archaeology," said Baxter, sifting through another pile of dirt in the hot sun. "Everybody's interested in this. I used to dig ditches when I was a kid, but nobody wanted to come watch me."

Kam Wah Chung, which means "Golden Flower of Prosperity," was the home and business of Lung On, who ran a mercantile, and Ing "Doc" Hay, a popular healer who diagnosed illness by feeling a person's pulse and then dispensed herbal remedies. The pair bought the building in 1887, and Hay remained there until almost 1950.

Hay willed the building to the city, but it remained shuttered and mostly forgotten for 20 years. When people opened it in the early 1970s, they were amazed to find it much like it was in the early 1900s, complete with Doc Hay's herbal dispensary and Lung On's general store merchandise.

Once the new artifacts are back in the lab, Schablitsky said researchers will start to add new chapters to the two men's story by learning more about the community that surrounded and supported them. Digging up the relics is only the start, she said.

"We'll spend months washing, analyzing, cataloging, interpreting what we're finding," Schablitsky said. "One of the main reasons we're out here is what's going to be researched and written up."

And out of that will come not just research papers but history, told by voices from the past.

"It's about people - how they lived, what they made, how they spent their time," Schablitsky said. "This is American history. It's history you can't just read about."