A grove of young trees in the area of an archaeological find of an Indian village in Narragansett.

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

NARRAGANSETT — In the fall of 1986, a team of archaeologists from Rhode Island College carried shovels and maps onto a wooded site near Point Judith Pond and started digging a grid-like pattern of holes.

Hired by a developer who wanted to build single-family houses, the team was directed to make a cursory check for historical artifacts — a prerequisite before the company could clear the land and build houses.

What the team — and others who followed onto the site — found would send shockwaves through archaeological circles.

Buried just below the surface was a view to a world that archaeologists and historians had seldom seen: remains from a cluster of Native American structures dating to the 1300s and more than 20 circular pits in which people had stored corn.

Along the East Coast of the United States, researchers had found only one other site with extensive evidence of a seaside Indian village. And with only a small portion of the Rhode Island site excavated, they say this is just the beginning.

“It’s just totally remarkable. It’s like suddenly being able to see,” said Paul A. Robinson, principal archaeologist for the Rhode Island Historic Heritage and Preservation Commission. “This allows us to walk through a coastal village and begin to see how it was laid out, the way the houses relate to each other, the different kinds of structures.”

The evidence has established the 25-acre site — not publicized until now — as one of national significance. It has also put the property at the center of a high-stakes legal battle, one that could ultimately determine whether the site is preserved or excavated or, as the developer has wanted for more than 20 years, made into a subdivision of single-family houses.

In a lawsuit filed Aug. 24 in U.S. District Court, the company developing the site says the state has deprived it of its constitutional rights by blocking the project. The suit seeks to end state interference and award “substantial damages” to the developer, which estimates having spent more than $10 million.

“I came here 22 years ago and that was one of the first projects that was handed to me,” said Raymond T. Lavey, executive vice president at Churchill and Banks Companies LLC, which owns the property. “It’s like a case study if you want to get a master’s in real estate.”

Churchill and Banks, formerly known as Downing Corporation, set out two decades ago to build 79 houses just east of Point Judith Pond. Before proceeding, the company had to check for historical artifacts, a common requirement in the state’s coastal areas. There were none on the eastern portion of the site, where 26 houses now stand. But the western portion, where archaeologists found stone tools and pottery fragments, was to proceed only after Downing met state demands for excavations, which led to more discoveries, including an Indian burial ground.

Legal disputes and rising costs eventually led Downing to put the project on hold, but the company returned to the site in 2006, paying the Public Archaeology Laboratory in Pawtucket to excavate a strip of land that was to become a road.

The team soon uncovered the evidence of the storage pits and 22 Indian dwellings.

The discoveries led the state Historic Heritage and Preservation Commission to do something it had never done in its 39-year history. On July 11, 2007, the board asked another state agency to withdraw a previously issued permit — in this case, the permit the Coastal Resources Management Council had issued in 1992 to Downing for its Salt Pond Residences project.

The CRMC responded by telling Churchill and Banks that its permit was still valid but would have to be reviewed in light of the preservation commission’s request. Churchill and Banks says the review never took place, despite the company’s requests.

The company complained in February, telling the Historic Preservation Commission by letter that the delays amounted to “the most reckless land confiscation idea in modern Rhode Island history.”

When the developers tried to resume work in June, the CRMC issued a cease-and-desist order.

Two months later, Churchill and Banks filed the lawsuit.

“To follow the rules over a long period of time and then to have a regulatory body change its position and stop the development in its entirety is not acceptable,” Lavey said before the lawsuit was filed. “It’s not logical, not reasonable.”

Churchill and Banks executives have declined to be interviewed since filing the suit, but the company said in a statement that it had “no other choice” but to take legal action. The suit does not specify the amount of damages sought or detail the company’s stated $10 million in expenses.

“Our goal is to fully and fairly develop our property, which has had proper zoning and permitting in place since 1992,” the statement said.

WEROWOCOMOCO, the other East Coast site with extensive evidence of a seaside Indian village, is now protected. Archaeologists at the privately owned Virginia property, believed to have been the home of Pocahontas, have uncovered a 50-acre village that dates to about 1200. Excavations continue with participation from local Native Americans, and the property has been designated a Virginia Historic Site and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Attempts to protect the Rhode Island site have failed thus far, for lack of agreement on what the property is worth.

Edward F. Sanderson, executive director for the state’s Historic Preservation and Heritage Commission, said the state was talking in the $2-million range, while Churchill and Banks was talking $10 million to $12 million. Some federal money might be available to help with a purchase, but there is no specific pool of money because the situation is so unique, he said.

“I don’t think anybody knows what the resolution of this is,” Sanderson said. “Ideally, it ought to be in public ownership, and it would be studied for years and years. From a scholarly, research side, this is a site of great importance that would continue to be studied by several generations of scholars.”

Watching closely to see what happens is the Narragansett Indian Tribe. While not a party to the court case, the tribe supports the state’s efforts to stop the housing project and will take an active role if needed, said Tribal Historic Preservation Officer John Brown.

“The protection of the property is for everybody,” he said. “While we sympathize with the plight of the owners, you can’t trade history for a house or three houses. It would be like trading a national monument. It would be like someone going in and building on the Arlington National Cemetery.”

The state, in fact, will argue that it has merely used its authority to protect and preserve “the historic value of the site,” said Michael Rubin, who heads the environmental unit at the state attorney general’s office. Much of the original 67-acre property was developed with the 26 houses on the eastern portion, he said, and the rest might still be developed some day, once appropriate steps have been taken to protect the artifacts.

EVEN WITH just a small portion of the remaining 25 acres excavated, archaeologists say the site — with its evidence of farming and structures that suggest a village-like settlement — has already provided a unique glimpse of Native American life. Items found there, though not museum quality, include post holes for circular and rectangular structures, corn pits, stone tools and pottery fragments, as well as plant and animal remains, Robinson and Sanderson said. There also appears to be evidence of a larger structure that may have served as a public meetinghouse.

For now, the artifacts are stored at the Pawtucket lab.

Robinson says the site was a logical location for a settlement, given its proximity to the salt pond and a trail that served as the highway of the day. It also matches the 16th and 17th century accounts of people such as Giovanni da Verrazzano and Roger Williams, who reported seeing extensive Indian settlements along the coast and places such as Narragansett Bay.

What makes the site so unique, archaeologists say, is that the evidence survived.

“All of New England was plowed. If it wasn’t developed it was plowed,” said Elizabeth Chilton, chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. “You don’t tend to see the kind of preservation that you have here. That’s what all of us archaeologists are excited about. They can look at size and shape of houses, which we have only little snippets of in southern New England.”

While formal excavations did not occur until the 1980s, the Narragansetts have long considered the site historic. For generations, oral histories of the Narragansett Tribe have described it as sacred, Brown said.

The Rhode Island Historical Society listed it more than 50 years ago in an inventory of historic spots, possibly because people who farmed the property in the 1800s and early 1900s had found things there, said Pierre Morenon, a Rhode Island College archaeologist and state historic-preservation board member who led the first survey team back in the 1980s.

“There was a contextual background to say that this was a likely spot,” he said.

redgar@projo.com