Outside the Bruce R. Thompson U.S. Courthouse in Reno, Nevada, stands a huge rust-colored steel sculpture pierced by rows of circular openings.
Michael Heizer’s Perforated Object, completed in 1996, at first looks like an enormous piece of industrial machinery or part of some unidentified structure. In fact, its form comes from something extraordinarily small and extraordinarily old: an object fashioned from a bighorn sheep’s horn more than 1,500 years ago.
But the story is more complicated than an ancient artifact inspiring a modern sculpture.
The object came from a Native American burial context excavated in the 1930s by archaeologists led by Michael Heizer’s father. The excavation and the later transformation of the burial object into monumental public art raise questions that archaeology itself has spent decades confronting: Who owns the past? Who has the right to disturb a grave? And does an ancient sacred or funerary object become simply an archaeological specimen once it is removed from the people and place to which it belonged?
Humboldt Cave
Humboldt Cave lies in western Nevada, in the Humboldt Range near the ancient Lake Lahontan region.
The cave’s dry environment preserved an extraordinary collection of material left by Indigenous people who occupied and used the area over thousands of years. Archaeologists recognized its importance early in the twentieth century.
In 1936, Robert F. Heizer, then a young archaeologist who would later become one of the most prominent figures in California and Great Basin archaeology, participated in and directed work at Humboldt Cave.
Among the material recovered was an unusual object carved from a bighorn sheep horn.
Approximately 90 holes had been drilled through it.
Its purpose was unknown.
Archaeologists associated it with the belongings of a person they identified as a Shoshone shaman and speculated that it could have had ceremonial or spiritual significance. Even that description needs some caution. “Shaman” was an archaeological interpretation applied to the individual and the associated objects; no surviving explanation from the person who made or owned the artifact tells us what it actually meant.
That uncertainty remains.
An Archaeological Discovery — and a Disturbed Burial
Another part of the story should not disappear beneath the description of the artifact.
The object was associated with a burial.
During much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American archaeologists routinely excavated Native American graves, removed human remains and funerary belongings, and placed them in universities and museums for study. The archaeological profession generally accepted such work in Robert Heizer’s era.
Native people frequently saw it very differently.
To descendant communities, these were not simply archaeological deposits. They were graves. The bones being removed were ancestors, and many of the objects accompanying them had been deliberately placed with the dead.
That distinction is central to the controversy surrounding the Humboldt Cave material.
From a 1936 archaeological perspective, excavation could be justified as scientific investigation and preservation of knowledge.
From an Indigenous perspective, opening a burial and removing what had been left with the dead could itself constitute desecration.
Those two understandings cannot simply be blended together.
Archaeology Changed
Attitudes within archaeology eventually changed, too.
For decades, museums and universities accumulated enormous collections of Native American human remains and funerary objects. Native nations increasingly challenged a system that let institutions excavate, study, and retain their ancestors and funerary objects indefinitely without descendant communities’ consent.
That conflict eventually helped produce the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, commonly known as NAGPRA.
The law created procedures for returning Native American human remains and certain funerary, sacred, and culturally important objects held by federally funded institutions. Modern federal law also requires consultation with tribes before intentionally excavating Native remains and cultural items on federal or tribal lands.
NAGPRA did not exist when Humboldt Cave was excavated in 1936, and it would be misleading simply to declare the excavation illegal by today’s standards.
But the law represents a fundamental change in who is recognized as having a legitimate voice in what happens to Native ancestors and their belongings.
That change makes the history behind Perforated Object impossible to view only as an interesting archaeological discovery.
The Archaeologist’s Son
An extraordinary family connection emerges in what happened next.
Robert Heizer’s son, Michael Heizer, was born in Berkeley, California, in 1944. He grew up surrounded by archaeology and accompanied his father to archaeological sites.
Instead of becoming an archaeologist himself, Michael Heizer became an artist.
He eventually emerged as one of the major figures in American land art, creating works on a scale that often approaches architecture and landscape engineering.
Decades after the Humboldt Cave excavation, he returned to the small perforated horn object his father had helped bring out of the cave.
He enlarged it approximately 450 times.
From Bighorn Horn to Bridge Steel
The transformation could hardly have been more dramatic.
Something originally small enough to hold in a person’s hand became a 27-foot-long, nearly 10-foot-high steel structure.
Instead of bighorn sheep horn, Heizer used massive weathering steel.
The Virginia Street portion of the installation stands upright outside the courthouse. On the opposite side of the building, another portion of the artwork consists of 90 steel rings representing the holes—or negative spaces—of the original object.
That second element stretches approximately 34 feet.
The ancient perforations have effectively been pulled out of the object and made into objects themselves.
The result is visually powerful.
But it also raises an uncomfortable question.
What exactly has been enlarged?
An archaeological artifact?
A work of ancient craftsmanship?
A ceremonial object?
Or a funerary possession removed from someone’s grave?
The answer depends partly upon who is looking.
A Native Artist Answers Heizer
That question eventually produced an artistic response of its own.
Shoshone-Paiute artist Melvin Brown created a work called Regenerated Pendant, exhibited in 2013, as a direct response to Perforated Object.
Brown did not simply offer another interpretation of the ancient artifact. His work challenged the circumstances that made Heizer’s sculpture possible in the first place.
For Brown, Robert Heizer’s archaeological excavation represented what has been described as scientific violence against Native people and their dead. Michael Heizer’s transformation of the excavated burial object into monumental art could then be seen as continuing the process: first the object was removed from its cultural and funerary setting for science, and later its form was appropriated for art.
Northern Paiute artist Melissa Melero-Moose has likewise described Heizer’s relationship with Indigenous culture as extractive.
From that perspective, the problem is not whether Perforated Object is impressive.
It unquestionably is.
The issue is what had to happen before the sculpture could exist.
A grave was opened.
People removed objects placed with the dead.
Those objects entered archaeological collections.
Decades later, one became the model for a monumental artwork the United States government commissioned.
That history is part of the sculpture whether visitors standing outside the Reno courthouse know it or not.
Two Heizers, Two Eras
A certain irony lies in the father-son connection.
Robert Heizer belonged to a generation of archaeologists that helped establish archaeology as a rigorous academic discipline in the American West. His work contributed enormously to what is known about the ancient peoples of California and the Great Basin.
Yet that same generation practiced archaeology under assumptions about Native graves, human remains, and ownership that have since been strongly challenged.
Robert Heizer himself eventually acknowledged broader failures in the relationship between archaeologists and Native people, criticizing a profession that too often failed to listen to the living descendants of the people it studied.
Michael Heizer inherited not only his father’s fascination with the ancient past but also, perhaps unintentionally, some of the unresolved questions surrounding how that past was acquired.
Perforated Object therefore connects two generations in more ways than one.
The Original Object Remains Mysterious
Even after decades of archaeological study, we still do not know everything.
What was the perforated horn actually for?
The rows of holes were clearly intentional. Considerable effort went into creating them. Its association with unusual objects led archaeologists to suggest a ceremonial or spiritual function.
But suggestion is not knowledge.
The person who made it lived more than fifteen centuries ago. Whatever meaning the object held was embedded in a culture and belief system that cannot be reconstructed simply from its physical appearance.
Michael Heizer enlarged the object enormously.
He did not solve its mystery.
What Do We See?
That may ultimately be what makes Perforated Object more interesting than a simple piece of public sculpture.
At first glance, we see an enormous piece of weathered steel.
Then we learn that it reproduces a tiny object made from bighorn sheep horn more than 1,500 years ago.
We then learn the artifact came from the belongings of a Native person buried in a Nevada cave.
We then learn that the archaeologist who led the excavation was the sculptor’s father.
And finally, we discover that Native artists have challenged both the excavation and the artwork that grew from it.
Each piece of information changes what stands outside that courthouse.
Michael Heizer transformed a tiny ancient object into a monumental steel sculpture.
But enlargement also magnified the questions surrounding it.
Who made the original object?
What did it mean?
Should it ever have been removed?
Who has the right to interpret it?
And what responsibilities accompany turning something taken from a Native burial into public art?
More than eighty years after the Humboldt Cave excavation, those questions may be easier to ask.
They are no easier to answer.
