In 1878, the Austrian geologist and explorer Ferdinand von Hochstetter went prospecting in the hills above Innsbruck. He wasn’t looking for gold or minerals. Rather, he needed exhibits for a newly founded Museum of Natural History in Vienna, of which he had just been named the director.
He found what he was looking for in a dusty drawer of the Renaissance-built Ambras Castle—a magnificent piece of feather work, tucked away in a case together with assorted objects from North America, China, and the Sunda Islands in Indonesia.Although it was folded up and somewhat moth-eaten, Hochstetter quickly realized he was looking at something special: a masterpiece of Mesoamerican art, probably Aztec, possibly from the court of Moctezuma II, ninth Aztec emperor who ruled from 1502 to 1520. If so, it would be one of the few surviving relics of its kind, a rare direct link to the last indigenous ruler of the Mexica. The possibility that this object passed directly from the Emperor to the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés gave it a value beyond price. It also meant that it was destined to be a point of dispute between the governments of Austria and Mexico up to the present day.
The largest part of the object is made of nearly 500 tail plumes from the resplendent quetzal arranged in a semi-circle. These alone would have been worth a fortune to the Aztecs. Nestled inside this dazzling green arc is a mosaic made from the body feathers of the quetzal as well as ones taken from a number of other tropical birds.
Four kinds of gold ornaments sewed to the feathers and arranged in rows complete the design of the outside. On the reverse side, each of the feathers is individually tied with maguey thread to a coarse-meshed fabric on a wicker frame.
Trouble was, Hochstetter didn’t know quite what this magnificent feather work was. It had been entered in the castle inventories at different times as an “Indian apron” and a “Moorish hat.” After much deliberation and study, he determined that both of these descriptions were wrong. The item, he decided, was a standard, a kind of flag that would have accompanied the emperor or his generals into battle.
Hochstetter published his findings in 1884. Other experts immediately took issue with his conclusion. It took a pioneering American anthropologist named Zelia Nuttall to point out the obvious. The feather work wasn’t a body garment or a battle standard: it was a head-dress. The old label had been right all along.
Nuttall based her arguments about the headdress on a careful examination of the object itself, conducted on location in Austria, combined with a detailed comparison to images and descriptions preserved in surviving Aztec codices. Nuttall published her work in 1887, as part of the inaugural issue of Harvard’s Peabody Museum Papers. When her writing failed to persuade her detractors, she arrived at the International Congress of Americanists in Paris the following year sporting a home-made model of the headdress on her head.
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