The Centaur Excavations at Volos

Using repatriation to stage an art heist

A Remarkable Find

In 1980, archaeologists working near the shores of the Aegean Sea uncovered a remarkable find. Peeling back layers of sediment in an ancient necropolis, they first encountered the head of an ancient Grecian man, mouth agape as if surprised to have been awoken from an ancient slumber. They traced the neck further down his body, gently brushing away sediment from the convoluted contours of the vertebrae, finding arms where arms should be and shoulder blades the same. But as they continued, the man’s character changed. Where there should be a pelvis, there was more spine, and then second sets of ribs and legs, not altogether human. As the archaeologists brushed the final bits of sediment from a third set of legs, the shocking reality of their discovery came into focus. The mythical centaur of old Greece, entombed with a modest assemblage of tablets and vessels for over 3,000 years.

This is, of course, not true. But it is an accurate description of The Centaur Excavations at Volos, an art installation located until recently for 30 years in the lobby of the University of Tennessee’s (UT) Hodges Library. I visited The Centaur many times growing up around UT’s campus. As a young child, I’m pretty sure I believed it. As a teen, I scoffed at those fooled by it. And later, I came to appreciate the piece for its ability to inspire curiosity and conversation.

But The Centaur is now gone. Like Theseus before them, UT’s repatriation committee swept in to slay the unruly beast, in their eyes an affront to decency and possibly a violation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). A coalition of NAGPRA practitioners spanning multiple states got together and seriously deliberated the ethics and legality of an art installation depicting an overt archaeological hoax, deciding that it must be reburied in Wisconsin to atone for its legacy of past harm. I am accustomed to overreaches by repatriation activists in archaeology, but its extension to the art world is a new frontier of this increasingly radicalized movement. Here’s what happened.

The Centaur

William Willers created The Centaur in the early 1980s while he was a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh (UWO). Willers, who passed away in 2024, was also an artist who primarily worked in stone but dabbled in centaurary (I made that up). Early in his career, Willers served as an advisor to the UW veterinary school, an experience that placed him in contact with the resources necessary to create The Centaur. The Centaur is pieced together from actual skeletal remains of both equine and human origin. For its back half, the horse-y half, Willers used the skeleton of a Shetland pony housed at the vet school. Its front half was more complicated.

Willers needed human bones, which were hard to come by prior to the advent of fabricated skeletons in the 1990s. In the early 1980s, human remains were primarily sourced from India, who had supplied over a century of legal (if ethically dubious) trade in human remains obtained in part from unclaimed corpses floating in the Ganges River. Willers purchased a human skeleton from a medical supply house before Indian banned the practice in 1985.

The bones arrived and everything looked great with a single exception: the head. The cranium was cut in two pieces around its crown in the place where one might get a bad bowl cut. The incision facilitated brain removal and exposed the braincase for reference, a common practice for medical specimens. For an art piece striving to create a realistic mimic of a centaur, this would not do.

So Willers asked around the vet school for replacements. As Willers put it, “one of the vet school people” knew of a badly damaged human skulll that had been around the department since before memory, presumably from a long neglected medical specimen. The fragmented skull may have been a poor teaching aid, but it was perfect for an art piece depicting an ancient archaeological specimen. Willers put the skull to good use and replaced his modern skull with the older one.

His centaur complete, Willers sought a place to exhibit it, which he found at the Madison Art Center in 1984. In a glowing review of the piece, Milwaukee Journal art critic James Auer describes the work as “a wondrously persuasive put-on” presenting “humor, originality, and an insouciant point of view.” Auer sassily contrasts The Centaur with a far larger yet “ill-focused and painfully uneven” juried exhibition shown at the same time. Willers followed up his exhibition at the Madison Art Center with shows at the Addison Gallery in Andover, Massachusetts and Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio in subsequent years.

Auer concludes his review of The Centaur with a foreboding account of things to come: “All that is needed…to establish the exhibition’s total credibility is a line of picketing centaurs outside the museum’s revolving doors, indignantly protesting this heartless desecration of their ancestor’s resting place.” Little did Auer know that his tongue-in-cheek characterization would be a prescient view into The Centaur’s ultimate fate.

Tennessee Bound

The seeds of The Centaur’s move to Tennessee were planted over a decade prior to its installation in the Hodges Library when artist Beauvais Lyons reached out to Willers about the piece in 1984. Lyons has been at UT for over 40 years and is now a Chancellor’s Professor and Divisional Dean for Arts and Humanities. He has since the beginning of his career been interested in hoaxes, the sorts of fabrications that undermine knowledge production in an academic context but inspire critical reflection when presented through an artistic lens, what Lyons calls a “didactic hoax”. Lyons has for decades curated the “Hokes Archives”, a fake print collection depicting fake cultures and biologics that together comprise a fake scientific reality born of a mischievous artist invested in inspiring reflection upon how and why we know what we know.

A representative Beauvais Lyons print from the Hokes Archives depicting fabricated architecture of a lost civilization. Entitled Alte Steinenkmaler (old stone monuments)

The Centaur needed a new home by 1987 and Lyons’ Hokes Archives seemed like just the place. So Willers reached back out to Lyons, indicating he would sell the piece for what he put into it, around $1500. Several years of sporadic communication and political wrangling resulted in a commitment to install The Centaur at UT in 1992. The Centaur was delivered to Knoxville in June 1993 and installed in the Hodges Library a year later after UT theatrical scene designer Bob Cothran built a mount for the piece.

Lyons assembled a diverse coalition of archaeologists, psychologists, classicists, artists, set designers, Greek life representatives, and zoologists to support the installation, each of whom contributed financially and academically to the project. This was a bold piece of public art to install in the most prominent location of one of UT’s most visited buildings. Consensus was key and Lyons was a convincing proponent, summarizing The Centaur’s academic value in a 1992 interview as follows:

Of course, we understand that the centaur is entirely mythological, but the value of a display like this is that it lures people into believing the centaur is real…When confronted by something like this, people begin to develop skeptical sensibilities and become more discerning of what they see, whether it be in journalism, on television, or in history.

Framed in this way, The Centaur was perfectly suited for installation in the Hodges Library, the beating heart of critical inquiry at UT who claim a commitment to “intellectual freedom” and “the constitutional principles of free expression and free access to ideas.” Once installed, The Centaur was on display for 30 years.

By any measure, The Centaur is a “great” work of art. For starters, it must be one of Knoxville’s most viewed pieces of public art, besides (I suppose) the notorious Sunsphere. The Hodges Library sees between 1.3 and 2 million visitors annually, and if only a small fraction of those visitors pause to appreciate The Centaur, we can safely assume that it has reached millions of people during its 30 year tenure. The Knoxville Museum of Art, an actual art museum, reaches a respectable, if paltry by comparison 70,000 people annually. The Centaur’s massive reach is a testament to Lyons’ foresight in building the consensus needed to install the piece in an auspicious and contextually relevant place.

That impact extends well beyond East Tennessee to a global audience of authors and critics interested in the intersection of art and science. The Centaur is featured in at least seven books and theses, including two Tennessee travel guides, a Pulitzer-prize nominated book, and Stanford University professor' Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters, an academic book about early Greek and Roman fossil hunters. The Centaur is no Peyton Manning, but it’s an important Knoxville icon in its own right.

And most importantly, The Centaur is aesthetically unforgettable, or what the Knoxville News Sentinel called “provocative” shortly after its unveiling. Public art is often bland to the point of meaninglessness, designed less for provocation than for integration with the built environment. The Centaur is not that. As soon as you figure out what the hell you’re looking at and grapple with its implications, you are then shocked once more to realize these are actual human bones, under glass, inches from your face. It is these qualities that gave The Centaur enduring artistic relevance. They also led to its demise.

The Problem

The problem with The Centaur is that 30 years passed, and in that time its use of human remains became controversial. Lyons was aware that The Centaur’s human half might pose issues from the beginning and was diligent in ensuring its legality. Colleagues in the Department of Anthropology were concerned about compliance with a newly passed law called NAGPRA, so Lyons inquired in 1992 correspondence to Willers where he sourced the human skeletal material. Willers responded that he purchased most of it but that pieces were swapped out, explaining “What I got has been around the Department beyond memory and may, for all I know, have been here since before the turn of the century…Please know that I haven’t been robbing any graves-of ANY ethnic group!”

Satisfied that The Centaur would not violate NAGPRA, Lyons then addressed a second hurdle, Tennessee code 39-17-312: Abuse of Corpse. Besides inspiring my college roommate’s band name, Abuse of Corpse also creates a felony offense for a person that:

1. Physically mistreats a corpse in a manner offensive to the sensibilities of an ordinary person;

2. Disinters a corpse that has been buried or otherwise interred;

3. Disposes of a corpse in a manner known to be in violation of law; or

4. Engages in sexual contact, as defined in § 39-13-501, with a corpse.

The Centaur was probably in the clear for points 2 through 4, but the “ordinary people” of point 1 could feasibly deem the artistic repurposing of human bones as mistreatment. Lyons inquired about The Centaur’s legality to several entities, receiving unhelpful responses from both District and State Attorneys General, and finally getting the go-ahead from UT’s legal counsel, who advised Lyons that he thought nobody would pursue litigation but not to “encourage the use of the image of the centaur in a coon-skin cap” or “the basis for fraternity rites” as some at UT had excitedly suggested. In other words, don’t let the Knoxville hillbillies at it.

UT’s legal counsel seems to have provided good advice. The Centaur never received a public complaint over 30 years and millions of visitors. The sensibilities of “ordinary people”, it turns out, are not easily offended by human bones.

But by the early 2020s, “ordinary people” were increasingly rare, especially within the insular world of the repatriation movement. At UT, that movement was led by newly hired Director of Repatriation Ellen Lofaro and small group of like-minded activists. Having already initiated a series of radical changes to the McClung Museum, Lofaro’s Repatriation Committee set it sights on the Hodges Library Centaur. In response to concerns regarding the provenance of bones used in The Centaur, Dean of Libraries Steven Smith commissioned a “Centaur Review Committee” in spring 2023 to look into the matter.

The Report

The Centaur Review Committee, a hell of a name, was comprised of Ellen Lofaro (UT Director of Repatriation), Claudio Gomez (McClung Museum Director), Joanne Devlin (Assistant Director of the Forensic Anthropology Center), and Lola Alapo (UT Marketing and Communications). While in the midst of deliberation, The Centaur was removed from display at the Committee’s request. The Committee submitted their findings in a report on November 30th, 2023.

The Committee determined The Centaur’s human half was comprised of at least three individuals. The torso was mostly comprised of a single individual, the medical specimen purchased by Willers, while the cranium and mandible were derived from two individuals, one of whom estimated between 12 and 18 years old. The committee could not determine ethnic ancestry based on visual inspection of the centaur. Besides, I suppose, Greek.

Based on these findings, the Committee recommended three things. First, that The Centaur be taken off display and never displayed again because it contains human remains of unknown origin from people who did not provide informed consent, one of whom a minor. This, they argued, violates internationally recognized ethical standards. Second, they recommended the human remains be removed from the exhibit to the Office of Repatriation for further analysis to determine if they are subject to NAGPRA. If not, the Office of Repatriation would facilitate a “respectful reburial” of the remains anyway. Lastly, they recommended that The Centaur not be reconstructed again using fabricated bones because it would “not encourage ethical or sound practices following national and international standards.”

It will surprise nobody that I found little value in this report. It was obviously a show trial intended to obscure the Committee’s pre-ordained outcome: removing The Centaur from the Hodges Library. In service to this outcome, the Committee left deficient several important aspects of The Centaur’s evaluation. Firstly, DNA would have determined with certainty the ethnic ancestry of the skeletal material, thus enabling decision makers to move forward with confidence. It may have also derailed Committee goals, so DNA was not considered. Moreover, the Committee was tasked with considering The Centaur’s “scientific, educational, and artistic” value in their report, none of which were addressed. Again, acknowledging The Centaur’s considerable artistic impact might have undermined their goal.

And lastly, the committee’s recommendation to forbid reconstruction of The Centaur using fake bones crosses well past the line between “abundantly cautious” and “overtly censorious”. Using fake bones would in no way violate “international ethical standards” regarding the treatment of human remains, and I am skeptical that such international standards exist in the first place. Neuroses about the use of human bones for education, science, and art are largely unique to the Anglosphere of the last 20 years. One need not look hard to find human remains on display in, say, Mexico City. Most importantly, the report did not resolve the issue but kicked the can down the road for “further research”. Unfortunately, further research did little to clarify The Centaur’s fate.

The Heist

Between the Committee’s report in November, 2023 and April, 2024, UT’s repatriation committee elevated The Centaur to national relevance by deciding it was subject to NAGPRA and fell under UWO’s duty of care (not UT’s), and then organizing a massive consultation between UT, UW Oshkosh, and 76(!) consulting Tribes that might hold claim to the installation. That’s 1/3 of Federally recognized Tribes outside of Alaska and California. Twenty five Tribes attended the online consultation, five of whom demanded immediate repatriation of The Centaur. Not the bones with uncertain provenance. Not even just the human half of the centaur. The entire installation, complete with horse bones, fabricated pottery and tablets, and its custom-built display.

In an inquiry to UT Provost John Zomchick about the matter, Zomchick listed four justifications for his decision to return The Centaur to UWO. First, Zomchick contended that Willers had no right to sell The Centaur to UT in 1993, presumably because Willers was not able to produce provenance documentation for the remains, both human and equine. Thus, UWO contended that UT illegally held The Centaur for over 30 years. Following this, duty of care provisions outlined in recently revised NAGPRA regulations fell to UWO as the rightful “owner” of The Centaur. This finding then led UWO to initiate NAGPRA consultation with local Tribes, who indicated a “spiritual connection” created between the human remains and their associated fake artifacts and housing during their several decades of co-association.

There are (at least) a couple issues with this line of reasoning. Most, if not all of The Centaur human remains are Asian, and thus not subject to NAGPRA. They are Indian, but not of the American sort, which creates an ethical transgression of its own. Further, UWO’s claim to title for The Centaur is tenuous at best and outright false for the portions fabricated at UT. There are no NAGPRA provisions that allow for “spiritual connection” to guide the repatriation process, so any components fashioned at UT are unambiguously their property.

Brushing these legitimate concerns aside, UWO sent a van to Knoxville in August, 2024, loaded up The Centaur, and hauled it back to the north country to await repatriation. In the absence of legal justification for the transfer, there’s really only one way to characterize it: an art heist. An art heist perpetrated by legal and political wrangling rather than ski masks and duffel bags, but a heist nonetheless.

One Last Hoax

The Centaur has not been listed on the Federal Register for repatriation a year and a half after its return to Wisconsin. That’s because once it arrived, UWO personnel did what UT’s repatriation committe couldn’t and determined The Centaur’s human half showed no evidence for Native ancestry, like Willers contended all along. In consultation with Tribal partners, UWO decided to “respectfully” bury The Centaur anyway. It awaits that fate today.

I hate this outcome for The Centaur, the physical object. I love it for The Centaur, the idea. The dead beast fooled the living a final time by leading them to believe it was at the center of a national ethical dispute, drawing in the administrators and legal counsels of two Universities and 25 Tribes. There’s probably a Hindu god for this, the god of human folly, doting over Hindu bones soon to experience a Christian burial in the heart of the American midwest. If so, I hope they’re having a good laugh.

In the meantime, us mortals are left to deal with the repercussions. Given the outcome, there is a good case to be made that this is outright property theft by UWO. I would guess that UT isn’t taking it more seriously because they want the issue “buried” for good, having invested more in wages investigating the issue than they perceive The Centaur to be worth. But I wouldn’t be so sure. Although The Centaur was purchased, transported, and installed for only $7,000, its legacy since then has undoubtedly increased its value, especially given its recent brush with controversy. It’s crass, but The Centaur’s loss isn’t just symbolic, it’s monetary as well, likely in the six or seven figures.

Hopefully, this case is also a valuable lesson learned for overzealous NAGPRA practitioners eager to demonstrate they are DOING SOMETHING without first figuring out what they’re doing. This entire process was guided by the remote possibility that a small portion of The Centaur MIGHT be subject to NAGPRA. The Centaur was always a poor candidate for repatriation, especially in light of the thousands of actual cases awaiting attention at UT. On the other hand, removing the much-beloved installation was a highly visible virtue signal, which makes me question where the priorities of UT’s repatriation team actually lie. The case of The Centaur is a good reminder that doing NAGPRA is an actual job, not just a means of accruing good PR.

It is a great irony that a work of art created to inspire critical thought ultimately fell victim to such a thoughtless political movement. But perhaps that too will, in time, become a valuable aspect of The Centaur’s lore. Colleagues at UT tell me that plans for a Centaur 2.0 are in the works, a piece that incorporates lessons learned from the trials of Centaur 1.0 and hopefully some subtle jabs at those who sought to erase the piece from history. My greatest dream is for a day, 10,000 years from now, when intergalactic archaeologists uncover The Centaur from its Wisconsin burial plot, scratch their heads, and wonder what strange culture compiled the bones of south Asians and a British pony raised in the American midwest, assembled them into a beast, surrounded them with Greek artifacts, and interred them all in an isolated grave in the center of North America. I can think of few artifacts more emblematic of the 21st century Anglosphere. I suspect Willers would love it, this final hoax of The Centaur.

William Willers (b. 1938 d. 2024) with The Centaur in 1984