Backstory: A smoke cloud's silver lining

Margaret Hangan was home finishing the Sunday crossword puzzle the night the call came this past July. The urgency in the US Forest Service dispatcher's voice on the other end was unmistakable: Ms. Hangan was going to have to change into her fire clothes, grab the bag of gear and maps she always keeps ready, jump into her pickup, and step on the gas to meet up with the Forest Service Fire Command unit at the edge of the backcountry east of San Diego.

The flames of a wildfire that night were moving fast, too. When she arrived, Hangan learned that bulldozers were already in place in nearby Corral Canyon, poised to carve a firebreak through the rugged terrain. And that's where she needed to be – not as a firefighter saving trees or homes but as a US Forest Service archaeologist saving ancient native American sites from destruction by the firefighters themselves.

With only her headlights to illuminate the way, Hangan could barely make out the dirt road she was bumping along. But she could easily see in the distance the eerie orange glow of what would be called the Horse Fire moving up the far side of a ridge. She already knew the only thing she had any chance of saving was the past.

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Wildfires regularly scorch swaths of the American West, causing major destruction to nature and property – indeed, since 2001, fires have burned more than 200,000 acres of this 460,000-acre national forest alone. But the fires also create extraordinary opportunities for archaeologists like Hangan. In the burning away of centuries of plant growth, new finds are often exposed.

Fire actually wreaks less havoc on such sites than the bulldozers that firefighters use to stop the advancing flames do. In the past, old villages and ancient resting places have survived wildfires with relatively little damage. When crews clear a fire line, however, they can unknowingly destroy a site.

That's where an archaeologist like Hangan comes in. When she arrived at the Horse Fire with her Global Positioning System and topographical maps, her job was to guide bulldozers away from areas previously identified as archaeologically sensitive. Though firefighters had already started digging their firebreak, she was able to determine from archaeological surveys that it was not a probable site of ruins. The firefighter's main focus, of course, was fighting the wildfire and saving lives and property. But firefighters here are also committed to protecting the history that nature has hidden for centuries, as it had in Corral Canyon.

The 1966 National Historic Preservation Act charges federal agencies with the responsibility of preserving sites of historic and cultural significance, and has led to the creation of staff archaeologists at the National Forest Service. Their role involves surveying forestlands and maintaining working relationships with local firefighters. For safety's sake, Hangan has even received standard training in the basics of firefighting.

So the night the Horse Fire started, Hangan explains, there was already awareness that this area held cultural treasures. And she was able to determine quickly the probable locations of unearthed sites based on visible evidence such as oak groves and riverbeds (all desirable amenities to ancient inhabitants). In its eight-day course over 16,681 acres, the Horse Fire revealed a previously undiscovered 2,000-year-old native American "kitchen" – a bedrock mortar unscathed by the flames.

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