History is often a record of wars and victories, the triumphs of the rich and powerful. But most people who’ve ever lived were just like us—stepping out their doors each morning, feeding babies, trying to survive hunger, cold, or politics. Ordinary. Nameless. Faceless. Forgotten.

Until you stumble across a remnant — a fragment that brings them back into view.

You travel, as I have, to Tel Aviv, and within sight of the Mediterranean you stoop to find a shard of iridescent Roman glass.  You finger it in your palm, and think: Who made this?  Who last held it in their hand?  

In Mexico, you pluck a fragment of decorated pottery from the dust and think, Would I have been the artist in this city, crafting vessels for the temple?  

Walking through a battlefield, you find shell fragments, a lone boot, a bone: Would I have been brave? 

Climbing through the Italian Alps, you peer into a centuries-old stone hut, and wonder: Who lived here?  What did they eat?  How did they survive?

Wonder: where awe meets imagination. We try to picture the past, even as we’re overwhelmed by how truly unknowable it is. When fragments surface, we’re struck silent by the sheer number of lives that came before us — their survival, their achievements, their deaths. We are burdened by the weight of history.

***

While teaching art in the Italian Alps in 2014, I spent my free time wandering the hills above the village of Bobbio Pellice.  Daily I would stumble upon old stone houses and sheep pens, and wonder to myself: who lived here?

Over time, I learned that these mountains had been inhabited for centuries by the Waldensians, a Christian movement founded by Peter Waldo in the 12th century.  They pursued a simple, authentic Christianity by reading the Bible in their own language (a novelty for that time), and seeking to follow Jesus’ teachings.  Tragically, this put them at odds with the Catholic Church, who ostracized and sought to crush them. For centuries they were forced to live high in the mountains; yet even then they were often hunted down, tortured, and slaughtered.  Milton wrote of it in On the Late Massacre in Piedmont:

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter’d saints, whose bones

Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold, ...

Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled

Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans

The vales redoubled to the hills...

To his credit, Pope Francis asked the Waldensians for forgiveness the year after I was there: “On the part of the Catholic Church, I ask your forgiveness, I ask it for the non-Christian and even inhuman attitudes and behaviour that we have showed you.”

Today, the hills surrounding Bobbio Pellice, Italy, are still littered with the artifacts of this story.  The terraced hills, granite paths, stone houses and pens, mountain-top monuments, and caves for secret meetings: all ghosts of a hunted people scraping a living from the stony mountains.  

I was reminded of a verse from Paul’s letter to the Hebrews:

They were tortured… They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated — the world was not worthy of them. 

As I roamed these hills and homes, I wondered: Who lived here?  How did they survive in these stony mountains?  How many froze or starved?  Which of these cliffs were they tossed from, babies first, parents to follow?  Would I have survived?  How does anyone endure discrimination, oppression, displacement, and still carry on — even today?  

These photographs are my way of asking those questions — of history, and of myself.  They are fragments held to the light, moments where wonder becomes a way of remembering.  Through image and imagination, I seek to bear witness to those who moved through these mountains: ordinary, resilient, faithful people.  In honoring what remains, I hope to give voice to the silenced, and remind us that history is not only something we study — it is something we carry.