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All archaeologists remember that they first came to a layer of darkened stains during excavations. For me, I was in Tel Khalif, in southern Israel. I was tired of the hole. The director of Digg discovered dark soil from above.
The black stain was a burn layer, and was produced when the fire tore through the village. It was a great traumatic material residue – lifetimes consumed and carbonized.
The burn layer will mark the timeline. There may be a previous one, after-sale, and you may not be mistaken for the next one.
Our home in Altadena has its own burn layer since January 7th. Our family is one of the thousands who lost their homes in the Los Angeles area wildfires. I stood in the ashes of the house, looking at my wife’s Kali, sifted through the pieces, melting iron and thick antique glass, which had melted so hot that the fire had survived.
Unlike most people looking for fragments from the January fire, this is not the first time they have excavated a bleed tile of life that was destroyed. Karly and I are both archaeological historians.
Humans tend to build and rebuild in the same place. In archaeology, hills made up of ruins from successive periods are often referred to as “tels” for their depths over centuries and many yards over thousands of years. While distinguishing between Tell’s layers is a subtle art, the burn layer stands out from everything around it.
In the burn layer of Tel Khalif, I spotted the Assyrian arrowheads and the Barista Stones. I stood on the hill, looking towards the edge of the Negev desert, imagining the villagers as the army appeared in sight. Did they run? What did they think would happen later?
Like the inhabitants of the long people of Tel Khalif, we saw the destruction coming – the fire on the hillside of Eton Canyon was visible through the windows of our bedroom. It wasn’t something that was unfamiliar. In 2020, Bobcatfire brought harmful smoke and ashes to Altadena after seeing the burning hillsides burn at the Lacressenda during a 2009 station fire. On January 7th, there was almost no electricity in most cases. The Santa Ana Wind was a familiar part of Los Angeles life, and the flames of the night seemed less dangerous than what we had encountered before. We packed our bags for the night, went down the hill with our kids and expected to go home in the morning.
We returned the next morning, avoiding emergency vehicles and weaving in fallen trees and power lines. (It was a while back when the National Guard closed the area.) But what we saw at our address made no sense. This was not like a fire in a movie or TV home. After the brave efforts of the firefighters, there was no black shell dripping with water to save it. Instead, there was nothing. The house just disappeared. He saved the unstable, towering chimney and the huge concrete pillars that supported the entrance. What was purely left of it was disorienting.
Later when we returned to the site, a random surviving object pointed us. A small cast iron bedside table fell from the second floor, near the fireplace just below. Our toddler diaper buckets in the hollows of the crawl space mix with the remains of the dining room.
Our archaeological training taught us to search for these little clues and to reconstruct the outlines of the story above the house from them. At another Israeli site, Tel Azeka, Kali unearthed the skeleton of a young woman who had been crushed under the pottery that had once fallen from the upper floors. We know we are one of the lucky ones. At least 18 people from Altadena were killed in the Eton fire.
The house we lost was built in 1913 for the heir of a spinster named Helen T. Longstress. The architectural plan was caught up in the Huntington Library with linen ink. Drawings of exterior timber and internal timber and built-in cabinets that exemplify both the muscular and complexity of artisanal architecture at the end of the LA-area style peak. The beams supporting the large front pouch were painted with impressive 6×12 inches crushed during the period when 6×12 means 6×12.
For Etonfire, it was all fuel. And it was all gone.
Or almost gone. Near the front of the house was Carly’s office and a 3,500-volume library. Like everything else in the house, it was a complete loss, but it had not yet disappeared. It was in part of a house with no concrete sub-floors and second stories, so some of the books on the bottom shelf are still in neat rows of ash, with the stitching of the spine still visible. I was able to pick up one, as if it was still a book. But his hands quickly collapsed and began to blow away in a light breeze.
It reminded me that the burnt scroll from Herculaneum, Getty Villa, was modeled. Pompeii’s ashes are frozen in dead poses as waves of volcanic ash and lava. Here was the image of a book and a bookshelves, but no words survived, and no life was in it.
For me, fire drove me home what my work in life as an ancient historian taught me, what Shelley had crystallized in his poem “Ozymandias.” But perhaps the Bible says it most succinctly: “You are dust, and you will come back to dust” (Genesis 3:19).
Oddly, I can still feel fortunate to be denied very forcibly and denied the fantasies of material permanence while still in the midst of my life. How many seniors look around their homes and wonder what to do with all this?
I left the ashes. However, Carly went back a few times, wore a PPE and sifted it. From the ashes, she subtracted an assortment of strange survivors: fragments of ceramic plates, incorrectly shaped metals, and coffee mugs not recommended by public health officials to use. (Archeologists often lick pottery from excavation, but it’s better to show decoration, but they have no toxic metals to the soil dust.)
She also unearthed several gems, including a star sapphire ring belonging to her late father, and a cheap metal lotus bowl that I loved.
Like the ruins of our home, the Tel Khalif site has almost brought about small discoveries. A small clay figurine that could have been a child’s toy. I imagine the people who lived there, without the time to gather everything together, and without an efficient way to transport their heavy pottery.
Some of the items we left behind are currently unrecognizable. The others have disappeared completely. Hundreds of toy cars passed on to our younger brother by our older son left without any trace. Similarly, photographs of the art and family that adorned our walls. Archaeologists were reconstructing the past from the fragments left behind, so the irregularly preserved wreckage in our homes is a calm reminder of how much of the site’s most meaningful objects disappear.
Some of the surviving items may be restored, at least in a sense. You can glue a crushed lilac plate from my step-sister. The earrings I gave the curly before the wedding may still be wearable. However, there is no illusion that these items represent the victory of our own permanence. In the ancient world, buildings were sometimes rebuilt to the same foundation, but even the foundations of our homes are not left behind. The Army Corps of Engineers have already cut down many of us. Many future archaeologists may not find them.
Carly’s excavation is her efforts to retrieve some of the previous pieces and tie them together after they have not yet been decided. They are and still do so today, symbols of the relationships and beauty that gave meaning to our lives before the fire.
We were reminded of this story in weeks of the fire in both parts, both before and after. Our neighbors and colleagues rose to their feet around us and picked us up from the literal figurative ashes. Government officials have worked tirelessly at the disaster recovery centre to guide us towards a new beginning. We lean heavily towards both friends and strangers. We struggle to maintain the hopes we need to rebuild this unexpected afterlife.
To return to the Los Angeles County burn zone, it takes hope and faith to rebuild on top of the burn layer. This hope is part of our humanity. Nick Cage wrote: “Hope is not a neutral position. … It is hostile. It is the feelings of warriors that can be sarcasmically wasted.” The world that existed before the fire lives more in our memories than any material, but we are always built on the foundations of the past. Like the human body, Altadena heals. However, the burn layer is always just below our skin.
Christopher B. Hayes is a professor of Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. In 2024 he also taught at the WF Albright Archaeological Institute in Jerusalem. Kali L. Crouch, professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Jewry at Ladboud University in the Netherlands, contributed to this article.
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