Tongues of Flame Reveal the Past

A serendipitous opportunity created by the summer’s devastating fire in the Sequoia National Forest has led to the discovery of hundreds of Native American relics, prompting archeologists to refine the conventional history of Native Americans in Central and Southern California.

Much of the 80,000-acre fire that blew through this rugged stretch of pinyon pines and sagebrush in July and August raged in protected federal wilderness. There, development and mechanized travel are banned, making it more difficult for archeologists to gain access for digs.

During the blaze, however, bulldozers had to build fire roads. Construction of roads is one of the few events that can open these areas to archeologists--and what was a disaster became, for them, a rare opportunity.

So, amid towering flames and thick smoke, archeologists strapped on yellow hard hats and set off on foot in front of the bulldozers. They say their finds in those August days, and in the weeks since, have been astonishing.

On one cliffside, they discovered an elaborate pictograph adorned with stars, a diagram that may depict a celebration of the solstice. In a patch of scorched woods they came upon a full-service kitchen of sorts: a series of grinding areas carved into granite boulders by women preparing pine nut mush for dinner. Dozens of obsidian shards, scattered across patches of white ash, are evidence of widespread travel and trade.

“We weren’t expecting to find anything of this magnitude,” said Loreen J. Lomax, a U.S. Forest Service archeologist leading the mountain expedition. “This is very significant.”

Fire can be a useful archeological tool, experts say. It is not uncommon for flames to clear vegetation obscuring artifacts. Though sites are sometimes destroyed, new finds have been made in the wake of a number of blazes.

Last summer’s extensive fires in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado exposed hundreds of archeological sites. A fire in Six Rivers National Forest near Eureka two summers ago led to the discovery of river rocks that were used to extract fibers from fern stalks--an important step in basket weaving, said Ken Wilson, a U.S. Forest Service archeologist and the president of the Society for California Archeology.

But rarely do such finds fill in as many historical gaps as those discovered after the fire that ravaged the Dome Land Wilderness.

“This is an opportunity, especially because a lot of history was written with the present-day cultural bias,” Wilson said. “This is about refining history, and there is still so much to learn.”

Blaze Burned for a Month

It began with toilet paper.

That’s the going theory, anyway--that careless campers somewhere in the Sequoia National Forest, just north of Kernville and about 160 miles north of Los Angeles, were burning toilet paper when they set off an enormous forest fire.

That was in late July, and for about a month, the blaze ate through more than 74,000 acres of pristine wildlife, destroying at least eight homes in the remote Kennedy Meadows community. Dubbed the Manter fire, it was one of the first in what would become the West’s worst fire season since 1910.

The fire has changed everything in some areas of the Sequoia National Forest, including parts of the Dome Land Wilderness, a federally protected area in the northwest portion of the forest.

Today, many hills are still black with soot and stripped of life. The monotony is broken only by shoulder-high splinters of dark wood, the remnants of once-proud pines. Even many of the trees that appeared to survive have roots that were destroyed by the heat. They topple regularly; firefighters and scientists working each day to coax the forest back to health call them “widow makers.”

Twice in the last month, black bears, apparently famished because of the destruction of their habitat, have broken into buildings in search of food. Both were shot and killed. One still managed to bite a shopkeeper twice on the leg, despite being shot five times, said Dan Petzold, a spokesman for the Burn Area Rehabilitation Team.

A ferocious wind tears relentlessly through flood plains and valleys, with no trees or vegetation to impede it. Officials are bracing for widespread erosion and flash floods. They are making plans for swift evacuation of an elementary school, which they say could be washed out any day.

Some fires are considered beneficial to forests. They can eat away at underbrush, bringing more nutrients to trees. Their heat can help acorns release their seeds, and natural nurseries of oak trees often pop up in the weeks after a blaze.

But not here--not this time. This fire was so hot, and so destructive, that officials estimate the forest will not recover for 300 years.

The Native American bands who lived here for thousands of years believed that they lived in the womb of a living creature--Mother Nature, said Leonard Manueo Jr., a Native American assisting in the archeological project. The oil seeping from underground, they felt, was her blood, the soil her skin, the trees her arms and legs, the rocks her bones.

Little Understanding of First Settlers

The lone benefit of the fire, it seems, is the surprising archeological discovery, which is revealing a slice of California history in a stark reminder that our understanding of the West’s first settlers is still tenuous and incomplete.

So far, archeologists have documented more than 400 sites in the fire area containing Native American relics, some of them more than 3,000 years old, Lomax said. Worried that looters will disturb the sites, Forest Service officials decline to say where the artifacts have been found.

An early analysis of the new finds, she said, suggests that there were about 1,700 members of the Tubatulabal and Kawaiisu bands in the area of the fire before cattle ranchers, miners and Basque sheepherders moved in and, from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s, began pushing the Native Americans out.

The population figure is up to three times higher than some earlier estimates from historians.

Beyond sheer numbers, however, the artifacts paint a very different picture of the Native American community in Central and Southern California than many historians have offered in the past, Lomax said.

Much of their research was conducted in a very different time--some of it while Native Americans were being rounded up and sent to reservations.

Many historical accounts described the Native Americans who lived in the area at the time as unsophisticated survivalists--hunting-and-gathering clans that scrounged for a meager existence. Lomax asserts that her finds point to a far richer community, one touched by extensive trade and travel, interaction with many other Native American bands, kinship and spirituality.

The project is still in its infancy, and some historians in the past offered some similar evidence. But Lomax said a far more refined image of Native Americans in the region is beginning to emerge.

Although many historians have described the bands as transient and isolated, Lomax and her team have found hundreds of pieces of obsidian, much of it carved into tools such as scrapers to clean animal hides.

Obsidian is a volcanic rock cannot be found naturally in the Sequoia National Forest, Lomax said. It occurs along California’s coast--indicating that other bands traveled hundreds of miles to trade hunks of obsidian for items such as the Tubatulabals’ renowned wicker baskets.

Other relics indicate travel, trade and interaction, such as pottery shards from bands that lived in what is now the Bakersfield area, nearly 100 miles southwest of the forest.

The Native Americans in the region have also been described in the past as lacking spirituality, because they didn’t have either the capacity or the energy for it, Lomax said.

But she has discovered a series of paintings on the sides of large rocks that suggest otherwise. Rather than depicting hunts and animals, many of them seem to depict the heavens--swirling suns and dotted stars, even one that Manueo and Lomax believe is some sort of calendar.

“This was a large, established community,” Lomax said. “They were not isolated and they were not very territorial. As a whole, they worked as a group. And there was a connection, a spirituality.”

Stirrings of Eerie Mysticism

Even today, the unearthing of relics has taken on an eerie mysticism. Many Native American descendants in the region believe the project is stirring spirits from slumber, and to cleanse themselves after monitoring the research, they immerse themselves in the smoke of burning sage and cedar.

Other Native Americans say some artifacts, such as arrowheads, are too hot to hold when they are picked up--though the pieces have been buried in the chilly soil for hundreds of years.

The ghosts that some feel are watching the expedition haven’t limited their reach to Native Americans. Lomax conceded that she was “skeptical” of the spirituality surrounding the work. Then, one recent day, when she found herself alone in the woods at one site, she swears she heard chanting.

“It’s been an experience,” she said.

In a more practical sense, the finds are introducing many Native Americans who still live in the area to a culture they thought they had lost forever. When Native Americans were herded onto reservations in the 1800s, many were funneled into Catholic schools where they were forbidden to speak about the culture and traditions, Manueo said.

The practice was devastating to an oral tradition with no written language. Today, for example, there are only six people who speak the language of Manueo’s Bakalachi band, he said. And Native American descendants in the area aren’t even sure how some of the artifacts that have been discovered were used.

For instance, Lomax recently found a cupule--a test-tube-size indentation in a rock--that is believed to have been used for fertility ceremonies. But none of the Native American descendants were ever told how or why it was used.

“It was like we were gone,” Manueo said. “But here we are.”

None of the artifacts have been taken out of the area. They are documented, protected and shown to Native Americans who are suddenly enmeshed in their culture.

In one recent instance, a group of Native Americans working with Lomax at an archeological site discovered a pile of obsidian shards. “What’s this stuff?” they asked her.

“So I told them how obsidian flakes were used for arrowheads and other tools, and I told them why that was important,” Lomax said, standing in the blackened woods of the forest, in what was once a settlement of 100 Native Americans.

“It was really neat, being able to explain it,” she said. “This is their history, or what’s left of it. And now we’re just trying to protect that.”

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Times staff writer Bettina Boxall contributed to this story.

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From the Ashes

A forest fire last summer gave archeologists unexpected access to artifacts of ancient Native Americans.