HAYWARD — Just who he was and how he died has been lost to time, just like his way of life has vanished.
But a study of his bone fragments, unearthed earlier this month during the ongoing renovation of the Green Shutter Hotel at Main and B streets, showed he could have lived up to 2,000 years ago.
His bones also indicate he had grown to manhood and was an Ohlone. The Native Americans who fished and foraged along the shores and in the foothills of the East Bay before Europeans arrived, the coroner’s bureau of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office determined.
“I am not surprised at all,” amateur Hayward historian Frank Goulart said about the discovery of an Ohlone grave in the heart of downtown.
Goulart suspects other burial sites are scattered nearby.
Listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, the Green Shutter Hotel is getting an extensive makeover from developer Red Bridge Partners SF, including converting its rooms into 41 studio and one-bedroom apartments.
Sulphur Creek once ran under where the hotel now sits, Goulart said, and the Ohlone were known to gather near fresh water because they lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle.
Diaries of early Spanish expeditions also recorded an Ohlone campsite along San Lorenzo Creek, which still snakes through downtown Hayward toward San Francisco Bay.
As far back as March 1878, Native American bones were found on Main Street at roughly where Domino’s Pizza is now located, about half a block from the Green Shutter, according to Goulart’s research. More Ohlone remains were discovered on the street in 1894 when a sewer line was installed.
A March 1959 report in the Hayward Daily Review said a city crew working on Maple Court found bones of a Native American man and a teenage girl. An archaeologist estimated the bones dated from 1500 BC to 1000 AD.
The skeletal remains found at the Green Shutter Hotel were unearthed as a water line trench was getting dug Feb. 1, Hayward police Sgt. Greg Velasquez said.
Police initially got an anonymous call about the bone fragments, prompting the dispatching of an officer to the hotel.
“We wanted to make sure that we were not dealing with a homicide or something else suspicious,” Velasquez said.
No bones from additional people were found and no artifacts were present, said Andrew Galvan of the Ohlone Indian Tribe, who inspected the burial site with property owner Jeff Jurow five days after the discovery.
Jurrow said he did not anticipate the hotel’s renovation will be held up as a result of finding the bones.
The Green Shutter Hotel opened in 1926. But the first section of the building was constructed six years earlier, according to the National Register of Historic Places.
State laws protecting Native American burial sites require local authorities to contact the California Native American Heritage Commission in Sacramento after human remains are found.
The commission then consults its registry of tribes and designates a likely descendant, who decides what should happen to the remains, including whether to move them or re-inter them.
The commission picked the Ohlone Indian Tribe on Feb. 4 as the likely descendant for the bones found at the Green Shutter Hotel.
“No scientific studies will be conducted on the human remains,” Galvan, the tribe’s representative, said in an email. “The disturbed remains will be buried at an off-site undisclosed location at my request.”
Native burial sites have been discovered throughout the Bay Area, hinting at the network of tribes that once called the place home.
Human remains turned up during construction of an apartment building in Pleasanton in March 2014, for instance, and in October 2017 in Alameda, where an Ohlone man’s bones emerged during seismic work at Historic Alameda High School.
In February 2014, workers at the Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood found a man’s remains folded in a fetal position, wrapped in woven matting and with wooden tools.
Carbon analysis of nearby organic matter indicated the man lived approximately 7,500 years ago, making his remains among the oldest ever discovered in California, according to a report in the journal Anthropology Now.