Each archaeologist remembers the first time they came on a layer of blackened dirt during the excavation. For me, it was in Tel Halif, in southern Israel. I was crouching in a hole; The director of Dig spotted the dark ground from above above.
This black dirt was a layer of burning, created when the fire torn a colony. It was the material residue of a great trauma – whole lives consumed and charred.
A layer of burn puts a mark on a chronology. There is a before, and there is an after, and there is no harm to be mistaken for the other.
Our house in Altadena has had its own burning layer since January 7. Our family is one of the thousands of people who have lost their homes in forest fires in the Los Angeles region. I stood in the ashes of this house, looking at my wife, Carly, criticizing through the fragments to see what survived a fire so hot that he melted wrought iron and a thick ancient glass.
Unlike most of those looking for the debris of January fires, it is not the first time that we have excited the rubble of destroyed life. Carly and I are historians who practice archeology.
Humans tend to build and rebuild in the same places. In archeology, the hills made up of the ruins of successive eras – often many meters deep and covering centuries or even millennia – are called “such”. Sometimes distinguishing the layers of a Tell is a subtle art, but a layer of burning stands out from everything around it.
In this layer of burn with such halif, we found peaks of Assyrian arrows and BallistaIn Stones: Proof of the assault that destroyed the village in 701 BCE, part of the military campaign that the Emperor Sennacherib immortalized in wall panels of stone relief now displayed at the British Museum. I stood on the hill and looked at the edge of the Negev desert, imagining the villagers looking at an army appearing. Have they run? What did they think about after?
Like these inhabitants of such Halif for a long time, we have seen the destruction coming – the fire on the hills of Eaton Canyon was visible from the window of our room. It was not unknown: I watched the hill over me burn at the Crescenta during the fire of the 2009 station, and in 2020, the Roux Lynx fire brought smoke and harmful ash to Altadena. On January 7, the power had released most of the day, and the poor cellular reception without signifying that we had not seen the news of the Pacific Palisades. The winds of Santa Ana are a familiar part of the life of Los Angeles, and the flames that night did not seem more dangerous than those we had met before. We wrapped night bags, rolled on the hill with our children and we expected to go home in the morning.
We returned the next morning, weaving through shot down trees and power lines, avoiding emergency vehicles. (It took a while before the National Guard closed in the region.) But what we saw at our address had no sense. It was not like a house fire in movies or on television. There was no blackened shell that dripped water after the valiant efforts of the firefighters to save him. Instead, there was Nothing. The house had simply disappeared, except the precarious and imposing fireplace and the solid concrete pillars which had supported the front porch. Transportation enessé He was disorienting.
When we returned to the site later, random surviving objects oriented us: the small cast iron bedside table, fallen from the second floor at a place near the fireplace directly below. Our all-small layer bucket in the hollow of a sanitary vacuum mixed with the remains of the dining room.
Our archaeological training has taught us to seek these small clues and to rebuild from them the contours of the superior stories of the house. In Tel Azekah, another Israeli site, Carly once searched the skeleton of a young woman who had been crushed under a pottery that had fallen from the upper floors. We know that we are among the luckiest; At least 18 people from Altadena died in Eaton's fire.
The house we lost was built in 1913 for a single heiress called Helen T. Longstreth. His architectural plans, in Ink On Linen, met at the Huntington Library. The drawings of the exterior wood and multilayer moldings from the interior and the integrated cabinets testify to both the muscles and the complexity of the craft architecture at the end of the peak of style in the Los Angeles region. The beams that support the large front porch were drawn to an impressive 6×12 inch, ground in a period when 6×12 meant 6×12.
For the late Eaton, everything was only fuel. And everything was gone.
Or above all disappeared. Near the front of the house had been Carly's office, with a library of 3,500 volumes. Like all the rest of the house, it was a total loss, but it had not yet disappeared. Because it was in a part of the house with a concrete sub-level and no second floor, some books on the low shelves were always seated in neat and ash rows, seams on the thorns still visible. I was able to take one, almost as if it were still a book. But in hand, he immediately started to disintegrate and escape in the light breeze.
I was reminded of the charred rollers of Herculanum, on which the Villa Getty was modeled, and the ash human figures of Pompeii, frozen in the poses in which they died in the form of waves of volcanic ash and lava exceeded them. Here is the image of a book and a library, but without surviving words, no life.
For me, the fire has brought home what my work of my life as an antiquity historian taught me, what Shelley crystallized in her poem “Ozymandias”: we, humans, build monuments, only to make them disappear in the sand of time. But maybe the Bible says it most succinctly: “You are dust, and dust will come back.” (Genesis 3:19)
In a strange way, I am fortunate to be disillusioned so forceful of all the fantasies of material permanence when I am always in the midst of my life. How many elderly people are looking around and wonder what to do with All that?
I walked away from the ashes. Carly, however, returned several times, put on the EPI and sifted. Since the ashes, she has drawn a strange assortment of survivors: fragments of ceramic plates, distorted metal cups and coffee that no public health authority would recommend. (Archaeologists frequently lick ceramics from a excavation, to better show the decoration, but these have no toxic metals in the floor of the soil.)
She also searched a few jewels, including a star sapphire ring that belonged to her late father and a cheap metal lotus bowl that I liked, distorted but in a way himself.
Like the ruins of our house, the site of Tel Halif mainly gave small finds: the pottery that families stored, prepared and consume food and drinks; Small clay figurines that can be children's toys. I imagine that the people who lived there leave without time to collect everything, and without an effective way to transport their heavy pottery.
Some of the elements we have left are now unrecognizable; Others have completely disappeared. Hundreds of toy cars, transmitted from our eldest son to his younger brother, left without trace. Likewise, art and family photos that adorned our walls. As archaeologists are used to rebuilding the past from the fragments left, the remains of the erratically preservation of our house are a reminder which gives to think the number of most significant objects of a site.
Some of the surviving items can be restored, at least in a certain sense. A broken lilac plate from my sister-in-law can be glued together. The earrings that I gave in Carly before our wedding can still be portable. But there is no illusion that these elements represent the triumph of our own permanence. In the ancient world, buildings have sometimes been rebuilt on the same foundations, but not even the foundations of our house. The body of army engineers has already scratched our lot. Future archaeologists may not find much.
Carly's excavations are his efforts to recover some fragments of our front, and connect them to our post-determination of our adventure. These are symbols of relationships and beauty that has given sense to meaning before fire, and continue to do it even now.
We were told several times in the weeks following the fires of the meaning of our community in both parts of this story, before and after. Our neighbors and colleagues have risen around us, who come to seek us with literal and figurative ashes. Government employees have worked tirelessly at the Disaster Recovery Center to guide us to a new start. We continue to rely strongly on friends and foreigners, when we find it difficult to maintain the hope necessary to rebuild our lives in this unexpected after.
To return to the burning areas of the County of Los Angeles, to rebuild above the burning layer, will require hope and faith. This hope is part of our humanity. Nick Cage wrote: “Hope is not a neutral position … It is contradictory. It is warlike emotion that can relax cynicism.” The world that existed before fire lives in our memory that in any material remains, but we always rely on the basics of the past. Like a human body, Altadena will heal. But the burning layer will always be there, just under our skin.
Christopher B. Hays is a professor of the Old Testament and former studies of the Middle East at the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. In 2024, he also taught at WF Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. Carly L. Crouch, professor of Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism at Radboud University in the Netherlands, contributed to this article.
