Robert F. 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 he began a lifelong love affair with the cultures of Native Americans. As a young boy, he collected artifacts in and around where he lived; but he did not go on his first excavation until he was at Sacramento Junior College (1932–34). When he graduated from Lovelock High School (1932), with a class of eleven students, he wasn't eligible to attend the University of California at Berkeley because some of the requirements were not offered at Lovelock High. By a stroke of luck, as he was registering for classes at Sacramento Junior College, a faculty member heard that he was interested in archaeology and took him out of line to meet with the president of the college, Jeremiah Beverley Lilliard, who was similarly interested; and he became a protégé of Lilliard. After two years, Heizer went on to U.C., 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. In 1941, Heizer received his doctorate from Berkeley. In 1940, he married Nancy Elizabeth Jenkins, and they had three children—two sons, Stephen and Michael, and one daughter, Sydney. Robert and Nancy Heizer were divorced in 1975.

...
Wikipedia