Robert Heizer

Robert Fleming Heizer (July 13, 1915 – July 18, 1979) was an archaeologist who conducted extensive fieldwork and reporting in California, the Southwestern United States, and the Great Basin.

Robert Fleming Heizer was born July 13, 1915, in Denver, Colorado, to Ott and Martha Madden Heizer.

He spent most of his childhood in Lovelock, Nevada, where his lifelong interest in the cultures of Native Americans began.

As a young boy, he collected artifacts in and around where he lived, but he did not participate his first archaeological excavation until he was at Sacramento Junior College (1932–34).

When he graduated from Lovelock High School (1932) in a class of eleven students, he was not eligible to attend the University of California at Berkeley, as some of the requirements were not offered at Lovelock High.

He was registering for classes at Sacramento Junior College when a faculty member heard that he was interested in archaeology and took him out of line to meet the president of the college, Jeremiah Beverley Lilliard, who was similarly interested; subsequently he became a protégé of Lilliard.

After two years, Heizer went on to the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts with high honors in 1936.

There was little interest in local archaeology at Berkeley then, and Heizer dug with the only graduate student at the time, Waldo Wedel.

He also participated in fieldwork with Alex Krieger and other scholars in Nevada with financial help from Francesca Blackmer Wigg.

While in the graduate program, Heizer worked with many professors including Alfred L. Kroeber, who had Heizer write his dissertation on Aboriginal Whaling in the Old and New World.

He did work in the Sacramento Valley from 1936 to 1939, and in later years at Lovelock Cave, Humboldt Cave, and Eastgate Cave, all in Nevada.

His primary area of study was the Great Basin of the United States.

In 1940, he married Nancy Elizabeth Jenkins, and they had three children—two sons, Stephen and Michael, and one daughter, Sydney.

In 1941, Heizer received his doctorate from Berkeley.

After the war, he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (1945–46) and then began his thirty-year career at Berkeley, going from Assistant Professor (1946) to Associate Professor (1948) and finally full Professor (1952).

He also organized and directed the University of California Archaeological Survey (1948–60), which conducted many major excavations and various field studies around the state and produced 75 volumes in its Reports series.

While teaching, he worked closely with both undergraduate and graduate students, who helped inspire A Guide to Field Methods in Archaeology (1949) and The Archaeologists at Work (1959).

Heizer decided early on that more was going on in the west 10,000 years ago, although in the 1950s and 1960s it was widely accepted that there was not much going on.

This research included involvement with radiocarbon dating during the 1950s, and trace elements analysis of obsidian artifacts in the 1960s and 1970s.

He was never one to focus exclusively on theory, but was interested in discovering basic facts and methods in research areas of interest.

Heizer also used neuron activation analysis to determine trace elements on samples from his excavations in Mexico, one of the applications of this method.

He then used the same idea when he tested petroglyphs.

Heizer wrote hundreds of different works in the course of his lifetime.

He had never traveled out of the United States until he went to Tabasco to work at the La Venta site in 1955, examining the Olmec society with his colleague Philip Drucker, who had contacted him about his findings there.

There they found large stone monuments in the shapes of faces and statues.

They also uncovered a shrine that was buried on purpose because of its sacredness.

One of his lesser known, but highly important studies was the continuation of the work of C. Hart Merriam.

Merriam spent a great deal of his life doing fieldwork on the Native Americans of California.

After his death Merriam's family donated all his materials to the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Berkeley where Heizer and Kroeber took over the studies.

Heizer had over 1,000 of Merriam's articles published so others could learn from them.

Most of Heizer's research was in prehistoric and historic Native American peoples of the western United States, particularly in Nevada and California.

He conducted numerous analyses of preserved materials from the caves in Nevada, particularly fossil feces or coprolites, which helped determine what the human diet consisted of and dietary changes over time.

Heizer also helped lay the groundwork for scientific applications in archaeology.

He received an Honorary Doctorate of Sciences from the University of Nevada in 1965; two Guggenheim fellowships in 1963 and 1973; a year as a fellow in the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science from 1972–1973; an award for having distinguished scholarly contributions from the Southwestern Anthropological Association in 1976; awarded the Henry R. Wagner Medal of the California Historical Society in 1977; and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973.

Heizer's excavations included the Cooper-Molera Adobe Project in Monterey County, California, from 1971 to 1978.

Robert and Nancy Heizer were divorced in 1975.

Upon receiving his doctorate, Heizer taught for a year at the University of Oregon.

During World War II, he worked at the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California, as a marine pipefitter.

Dr. Heizer retired from teaching in 1979 and died later that year at the age of 64.

Heizer received many awards and honors during his lifetime.