The Guadalupe Dunes: Three Layers of Human Time

There are places on the Pacific coast where you can stand in one spot and be in three different human histories at once. The Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes are one of those places.

Below the surface, in the shifting sand that has been accumulating and moving for thousands of years, there are Chumash cultural sites: shell middens, the layered archaeological record of seasonal camps, evidence of a people who used this landscape for food, for trade, for ceremony, before any European ship arrived on this coast. The dunes have been under federal protection since nineteen seventy-four, when they were named a National Natural Landmark, and they became a national wildlife refuge in the year two thousand, partly because of what remains in the sand.

Also in the sand, at a depth of several feet in a location that researchers have been painstakingly working for decades, there is the buried film set of Cecil B. DeMille's nineteen twenty-three silent epic, The Ten Commandments. Thirty-five-foot plaster Pharaoh statues, five-ton sphinxes, painted reliefs and horse bones from the chariot sequences, all of it interred in the dunes because it was cheaper to bury an Egyptian city than to haul it away.

And on top of the sand, or rather in the dunes during the nineteen thirties, the Dunite colony lived in handmade shelters, producing a mimeographed literary journal and a community that lasted a decade before the Second World War ended it. Anarchists and nudists and Theosophists and poets, choosing one of the strangest landscapes in California as the place to try to live differently.

Chumash middens. Hollywood sphinxes. Anarchist poets. The dunes hold all three, indifferently. The wind that moves them does not distinguish between ancient shell and plaster sphinx. To the dunes, human time is all the same kind of sand.