Each archaeologist remembers the first time they arrived at a layer of Blackend land while they excavated. For me it was in Tel Halif, in the south of Israel. He was crouched in a hole; The director of the excavation saw the dark soil from above.
That black land was a layer of burns, created when the fire crossed a settlement. It was the material residue of great trauma, all the life consumed and carbonized.
A burning layer puts a mark on a timeline. There is a before, and there is an after, and there is no fog for the other.
Our house in Altadena has had its own burning layer since January 7. Our family is one of the thousands that lost its homes in the forest fires of Los Angeles-Kerea. I have stopped in the ashes of that house, watching my wife, Carly, sifting the extracts to see what survived a fire so hot that melted wrought iron and thick old glass.
Unlike most of those looking for the debris of January fires, this is not the first time we excavated the debris of destroyed lives. Both Carly and I are historians who practice archeology.
Humans tend to build and rebuild in the same places. In archeology, the hills composed of the ruins of the successive eras, or many depth yards and centuries of tension or millennia, are called “Tells”. Sometimes, distinguishing the layers of a Tell’s is a subtle art, but a layer of burns stands out from everything that surrounds it.
In that burn layer in Tel Halif, we find Assyrian arrow points and ballistaA Stones: Evidence of the assault that destroyed the village in 701 a. C., part of the military campaign that Emperor Sennacherib immortalized in stone relief wall panels now shown in the British Museum. I stopped in the hill and looked towards the edge of the Negev desert, imagining the villagers who looked at an army in sight. Did they run? What did they think would happen later?
Like those long inhabitants of Tel Halif, we saw the destruction that came on the slopes of Eaton Canyon was visible from the window of our room. It was not unknown: I had seen the hillside on me burned in the crescent duration the fire of the 2009 station, and in 2020 the fire of Lacones de Boba brought harmful smoke and ashes to Altadena. On January 7, the power had the leg most of the day, and the poor reception of the cells without it, we had the news outside Pacific Palisades. Santa Ana’s winds are a family part of Los Angeles’s life, and the flames that more dangerous Didem night than we had found before. We packed bags at night, we went down the hill with our children and expected to return home in the morning.
We return the next morning, weaving through fallen trees and electric lines, avoiding emergency vehicles. (He spent some time before the National Guard closed the area). But what we saw in our direction made no sense. This was not like a fire in the house in movies or on television. There was no blocked water that dripped water after the brave efforts of firefighters to save it. Instead, there was Nothing. The house was simply gone, except for the precarious and imposing fireplace and the huge concrete pillars that the front porch had endured. The pure Departure a Or was disorienting.
When we returned to the site later, random surviving objects guided us: the small cast iron night table, fallen from the second floor to a place near the fireplace directly under it. The diaper cube of our small child in the hole of a tracking space mixed with the dining room remains.
Our archaeological training taught us to look for these little clues and rebuild the contours of the upper stories of the house. In Tel azekah, another Israeli site, Carly once excavated the skeleton of a young woman who had been crushed under the ceramics that had fallen from the upper floors. We know that we are among the lucky ones; At least 18 people from Altadena died in Eaton’s fire.
The house we lost was built in 1913 for a maiden heiress called Helen T. Longstreth. His architecture plans, in linen ink, ended up in the Huntington Library. The drawings of the wood from the outside and the multilayer moldings of the interior and the certificate of cabinets incorporated for both the muscles and for the complexity of the artisanal architecture at the end of the peak of the style in the Los Angeles area. The beams that endured the large front porch were drawn to an impressive 6×12 inches, ground in a period in which 6×12 meant 6×12.
For Eaton’s fire, everything was just fuel. And everything was gone.
Or above all he left. Near the front of the house had been Carly’s office, with a library or 3,500 volumes. Like everything else in the house, it was a total loss, but it had still disappeared. Because it was in a part of the house with a concrete subsoil and without second story, some of the lower books still sat in ashes and tidy rows, seams in the still visible spines. I was able to collect one, almost as if it were still a book. But in his hand, it was immediately before disintegrating and flying in the light breeze.
I remembered the parchments loaded by Herculano, in which the Getty villa was modeled, and the ashrissel human figures of Pompeya, frozen in the poses in which they died as waves of volcanic ashes and lava themes on -tope. Here was the image of a book and a shelf, but without surviving words, lifeless.
For me, fire has taken home what the work of my life as a historian or seniority has taught me, what Shelley crystallized in his pond “Ozymandias”: humans build monuments, just to turn off the sands of time. But maybe the Bible says it more succinctly: “You are dust and dust that you return.” (Genesis 3:19)
Strangely, I tell Myelf for the fate of being deactivated with such force from any fantasy of material permanence while I am still in the midst of my life. How many older people look around their homes and wonder what to do with All these things?
I walked away from ash. Carly, however, returned several times, put PPE and sifted. Of the ashes, she took out a strange variety of survivors: fragments of ceramic plates, metal cups and deformed coffee that no public health authority would compete. (Archaeologists frequently lick the ceramics of an excavation, the best thing to show decoration, but those do not have toxic metals in the dust of the soil).
It also excavated some gems, including a star sapphire ring that belonged to its late father and a bowl of economic metal lotus he had loved, deformed but somehow is somehow supposed.
Like the ruins of our house, the Tel Halif site produced mostly small findings: the ceramics that families used to store, prepare and consume food and drink; Small clay figures that may have been children’s toys. I imagine that the people who lived there left without time to gather everything, and without an efficient way of transporting their strong ceramics.
Some of the articles we leave are now unrecognizable; Others have disappeared completing. Hundreds of toy cars, transmitted from our eldest son to his younger brother, left without a trace. Similarly, art and family photos that adorned our walls. As archaeologists used to rebuild the past from the fragments that are left behind, the remains conserved erratically of our house an alert reminder of how many sites must mean significant objects simply disappear.
Some of the surviving articles can be restored, at least in a certain sense. A lilac dish shattered from my sister -in -law can be glued. The earrings that I gave to 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, the buildings were sometimes rebuilt on the same foundations, but not even the bases of Home. The Army Corps of Engineers has already scraped our lot. Future archaeologists may not find much.
Carly’s excavations are their effort to save some fragments of us before, and connect them with our still decreased later. They are symbols of relationships and beauty that refer to our lives that mean before fire, and continuous to do it even now.
We have remembered the leg repeatedly in the week from the fires of the importance of our community to both parts of this story, the before and after. Our neighbors and co -workers have risen around us, withdrawing from the literal and figurative ashes. Government employees have worked tirelessly at the Disaster Recovery Center to guide us towards a new beginning. We continuously lean heavy of both friends and strangers, while we fight to sign the necessary hope to rebuild our lives in this unexpected later.
Return to the burning areas of the Los Angeles County, rebuked above the burn layer, will require hope and faith. This hope is part of our humanity. Nick Cage written: “Hope is not a neutral position … it is adversary. It is warrior emotion that can waste cynicism.” The world that existed before fire lives in our memory more than in any material remains, but we always rely on the base of the past. Like a human body, Altadena will heal. But the burning layer will always be there, just below our skin.
Christopher B. Hays is a professor of the Old Testament and the former studies of the Near East at the most complete theological seminar in Pasadena. In 2024, Hey taught at the WF Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. Carly L. Crouch, Hebrew Bible professor and ancient Judaism at the University of Radboud in the Netherlands, contributed to this article.
