Outside the Bruce R. Thompson U.S. Courthouse in Reno, Nevada, stands Michael Heizer’s Perforated Object, a massive steel sculpture based on a tiny bighorn sheep horn artifact more than 1,500 years old.

Heizer’s father, archaeologist Robert F. Heizer, recovered the original object from Humboldt Cave in 1936 during an excavation. Archaeologists found about 90 holes drilled through it, and it was associated with the burial belongings of a person they identified as a Shoshone shaman. Its actual purpose remains unknown.

Michael Heizer later enlarged the object roughly 450 times, turning something small enough to hold in one hand into a 27-foot-long steel sculpture.

But the story isn’t simply about an ancient artifact becoming modern art.

The original came from a Native burial. That raises questions about the era’s archaeological practices, when excavators routinely removed human remains and funerary objects from Native graves for study. Native artists have since challenged both the excavation and the transformation of the burial object into public art.

That gives Perforated Object a meaning far more complicated than its appearance suggests.

It is at once archaeology, family history, public art, and a reminder that the way we treat the past can become part of the story itself.

Read more details in Perforated Object: An Ancient Mystery Reimagined in Steel.

Braum’s may look like a regional fast-food and ice cream chain, but it is really something much more unusual.

The family-owned company raises its own dairy cows, processes its own milk, makes its own ice cream and bakery products, operates its own refrigerated trucks, and owns the stores where everything is sold.

That tightly controlled farm-to-store system is also why Braum’s remains regional. Its more than 300 stores are concentrated in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas, generally within about 300 miles of its operation near Tuttle, Oklahoma.

Braum’s isn’t simply a restaurant that sells dairy products. It is a dairy operation that built an entire restaurant and grocery chain around its farm.

Read more at Braum’s: The Regional Dairy Empire That Refuses to Go National

Most people driving through Yellowstone would probably see Obsidian Cliff as another striking piece of volcanic scenery.

For thousands of years, however, people saw something much more valuable.

They saw stone.

Obsidian is volcanic glass, and when properly worked, it produces an extraordinarily sharp edge. Native people quarried the obsidian at this Yellowstone site for more than 11,000 years, shaping it into spear points, knives, scrapers, and other tools.

And the stone did not remain in Yellowstone.

Obsidian from the cliff traveled across an astonishing portion of North America. Archaeologists have identified it in artifacts found as far away as Texas, Washington, southern Alberta, and Ohio. At certain Hopewell sites in the Ohio Valley, about 90 percent of the recovered obsidian originated at Obsidian Cliff—roughly 1,500 miles away.

Today, scientists can use the trace elements in obsidian almost like a chemical fingerprint, allowing them to link an ancient artifact found hundreds of miles away to the Yellowstone source from which it came.

Obsidian Cliff wasn’t simply a geological formation. It was a quarry, a workshop, and a link in networks connecting people across North America long before Europeans arrived.

Long before Yellowstone became America’s first national park, Obsidian Cliff was already a destination.

Read the full story: Obsidian Cliff: Yellowstone’s Ancient Stone Highway