More than any other major project of its kind in the city, history is playing a role in the effort to expand the sewer system to Bayside and the neighborhoods of Riverview, Longmeadow, Highland Beach and Bayside.

About 80 people got an insight to the significance of the area to Native Americans in the 1500s and 1600s, and perhaps even earlier, during an informational meeting last Tuesday at the Buttonwoods Community Center.

Bringing sewers to Bayside has been on the drawing board for more than a decade, but after archeological surveys in 2006 and 2008, in which evidence of American Indians were found, plans came to a halt. Funding for the project also dried up, and the Warwick Sewer Authority did not have the authorization for additional bonding.

Alan Leveillee, principal investigator for Public Archaeological Laboratory (PAL), who spoke at the meeting and has been retained by the Sewer Authority to identify archeological features and help devise plans as how to properly address them, called the area an “optimal place” for early Americans. He said it is near Narragansett Bay and Buckeye Brook, thus providing access to both the resources of the bay and its fish, shellfish and waterfowl, and fresh water. From what has been found, the Indians living there hunted and fished but did not cultivate crops.

From a historical perspective, he said, it is also an area that also has a history of cooperation and conflict between Rhode Island’s first settlers and the tribes living here at the time. During the King Philip’s War in 1675-76, it is thought a village of as many as 100 wigwams was in the area of where Tidewater Drive is today. During the war, Leveillee explained, most of the colonists fled to Aquidneck Island. Staying in Warwick were Thomas Greene and John Wickes. They stayed in what was known as the Stone Castle that was owned by Greene and stood on what is West Shore Road today, not far west from the Elks Lodge. Wickes’ reason for staying was his cattle. On one of his forays to check on his herd he did not return, and when a party went out to find him they found his severed head mounted on a pole near his burned-out homestead.

A defining point in the war was the Great Swamp massacre, in which colonists burned the Narragansett garrison in South Kingstown, killing an estimated 300, in December 1675. It was after that that Leveillee said the wigwam village in Bayside was torched.

Initially, a largely gravity sewer system was designed for the neighborhoods. That plan required significant excavation and a series of straight lines connected to interceptors carrying wastewater to pumping stations and larger pipes running to the treatment plant on the banks of the Pawtuxet River.

The area has always been rich in signs of early American activity. While not common now, the late Stephen Insana – the founder of the Buckeye Brook Coalition, with a mission of preserving the stream, which is a run for spawning herring – had a collection of arrowheads and tools recovered from his walks along the brook and its environs. He also located a number of mounds of shells that apparently had been used as dumping grounds in the wooded embankments near Gorton Junior High School.

So as to assess the extent of Indian activity, a series of cuts were made down the middle of Tidewater in 2008. Leveillee told the audience on Tuesday that that initial survey uncovered artifacts and features. Features consist of evidence of activity such as fire pits.

From the quantity of hits in these surveys, it was concluded building a conventional sewer system would be difficult without disturbing sites that are of spiritual significance to descendants of the tribes that lived here.

The Sewer Authority considered options including the use of low-pressure lines that don’t require extensive excavation, and use of underground boring that limits digging to the points where a line enters and exits the ground. The technique is used for utility feeds.

Todd Ravenelle of engineering firm Gordon R. Archibald Inc. said in place of a three-phase Bayside project, with each neighborhood being built independent of the other and then connected, the system is now designed to be built in two phases. The first of those would start this fall with the removal in 50-foot sections of Tidewater Drive, including its base gravel for its full 4,000-foot length. This will give Leveillee and PAL and the representatives of the Narragansett Indians the chance to identify archeological features that can be skirted when crews return to install a gravity-feed interceptor connecting to the system south of the Mill Cove Bridge.

“We want to make sure we have a route that will work,” Ravenelle said.

The second phase of the project will be installation of laterals, which are smaller lines, feeding into the interceptor. This will be a low-pressure system requiring homeowners to have individual pumps. Much of this work would be done using “trenchless technology,” Ravenelle said, to avoid disturbing areas of archeological significance.

“This is a case where we go slow to go fast,” Janine Burke, executive director of the Sewer Authority, said of the plan to conduct an extensive survey of the Tidewater roadbed and follow up with construction, which is projected to be done in 2018 and 2019.

The danger, Burke told the audience, is that construction crews will encounter “something very significant.” Obviously, that won’t be known until it shows up in the initial survey, which allows for evasive measures or worse during construction that could delay things while finding an alternate route.

Meanwhile, there were some in Tuesday’s audience who wanted to know what’s delaying the completion of the bridge that was to have opened by now. The blame is being put on National Grid for a natural gas line that, along with the sewer line, will run through the bridge deck.

City Engineer Eric Earles believes that job will be completed this month. But while the bridge may also be completed this month, it may be another month and maybe longer before it opens.

The plan, so as to avoid digging up that section of Tidewater from West Shore Road to Friendship on multiple occasions, is to install the sewer line and upgrade natural gas service on that area at the same time.

David Picozzi, director of public works, said last week it made no sense to open the bridge until work on that section of Tidewater is completed and the road repaved.