Digging into Bainbridge history

Rick Chandler yanked at ivy and scraped away dirt, looking for the remnants of a Bainbridge village that hundreds of Japanese immigrants once called home.

"Ooh-ooh! A tool!" the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum curator said, pulling a rusty hand file from a darkly forested hillside near Blakely Harbor.

Chandler and his small team of diggers, taggers, baggers and GPS-aided mapmakers are undertaking the first archaeological investigation of Yama, a village that bustled in the 1890s and burned in the 1920s. Over the years, the Bainbridge park district-owned site has grown over with trees and brush, but it's never been developed, leaving many artifacts on or just below the soil's surface.