
The Fight to Bring Home the Headdress of an Aztec Emperor - Thevet
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/moctezuma-headdress-mexico-austria
======
tekkk
"A study commissioned by the Austrian government claimed that a safe return
would be impossible without a specially designed case to protect it from the
vibrations caused by flight. According to the study, it would require a plane
984 feet long—the length of 2.7 football fields—and 164 feet high to buffer
the vibrations caused by take-off and landing. Since no such plane exists the
repatriation seems unlikely in the short term."

What a lame excuse. Have they ever heard of ships? You know, those things that
got the thing there in the first place. Granted maybe the study linked in the
article also considered the vibrations from a sea journey but in that case it
was poor wording on the writer's part. Not to nitpick too much =). Interesting
read nonetheless.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Here's an excerpt from the linked article[1] on the study (I can't find the
study itself, but it seems to be rather politically motivated and useless as
an engineering study).

I found the article difficult to read, but in short, they found that
vibrations of the display case were very slowly causing damage. So they built
it a vibration-damping vitrine, or glass display case, specifically to limit
these vibrations. The new case has a specification for how much vibration it
allows, while the headdress sits for years without moving in the museum. The
study requires it to undergo no more than that acceleration during transport.
Yes, to limit accelerations to 1.001g for an entire flight, you'd need a
stupidly large case that would allow it to slowly move to the back and down as
the plane took off. Just put it on some shock absorbers in a container and
send it across the ocean, it's not going to be accumulating damage in shipping
for decades as it is in the museum.

> _The vibration-proof design of the case and mount resulted from the
> discovery that the headdress was losing many of the individual barbs that
> make up its feathers. They were found, to the horror of the conservators,
> lying on the sheet on which the headdress was previously supported. As well
> as deﬁning the speciﬁcations of its new vitrine, the conservation scientists
> who analysed the headdress also reported that the levels of vibration
> encountered in transporting it – by air, for example, to Mexico – could
> destroy its ﬁne and brittle feathers._

> _...report was prepared by the same Austrian engineering company ... based
> on tests of the vibration in the gallery under different conditions, from a
> crowd of visitors and a glass cleaning .... All this can be mathematically
> predicted, and the more the vibration, the larger the container necessary to
> counter that vibration, according to the laws of physics._

1:
[https://www.academia.edu/31390854/The_Inbetweenness_of_the_V...](https://www.academia.edu/31390854/The_Inbetweenness_of_the_Vitrine_Three_parerga_of_a_feather_headdress)

~~~
dpark
> _Just put it on some shock absorbers in a container and send it across the
> ocean, it 's not going to be accumulating damage in shipping for decades as
> it is in the museum._

I agree it's a lame excuse. At some point they moved the headdress into the
case they engineered so clearly it's possible to move the headdress without it
instantly falling apart.

Although I always find these requests to return artifacts a little odd anyway.
On the one hand, yes, it's part of your heritage and I totally get why you
want it returned. On the other hand, if ownership was transferred legally
(gifted or sold rather than plundered), I don't see that you have any
legitimate claim of ownership. Imagine if France asked for the Statue of
Liberty back.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
> ownership was transferred legally (gifted or sold rather than plundered)

A legal transfer between equals is one thing. I agree that should be
permanently binding. Even if the depreciation of the funds used to purchase
the asset and the appreciation of the asset itself make the transaction seem
one-sided. But this headdress belonged at one time to the emperor who reigned
between 1502 and 1520...in 1521 Cortes conquered the Azteks. Whether it was
'gifted' or 'purchased', it doesn't seem possible to have a particularly
legitimate transaction in whatever exchange took place.

Perhaps a fair transaction would involve comparing the cost of the actual
purchase of the item (which may have involved a one-sided transfer) to a later
transaction of a similar item between equals. If a settler purchased a hundred
acres of land from a native for a string of beads valued at 9 cents, but
settlers sold each other land for $1.25 an acre, and those hundred acres are
now worth $300k then perhaps a court could agree that the original sale was
invalid and offer to allow the land to be repurchased for somewhere between
300k and the equivalent transaction of 300,0000 x 9 / 1250 = $2,160. Or, in
the case of this headdress, they could do a little reenactment. Give the
Mexicans some canons, black-powder muskets, and chemical weapons, and the
Austrians some flint knives, and set them on opposing sides of a remote rain
forest. See what sort of price they can come to agree upon.

------
drzaiusapelord
>he Austrian government claimed that a safe return would be impossible without
a specially designed case to protect it from the vibrations caused by flight.

The damage argument seems pretty self-serving. Even if there was damage during
the flight, how much would happen and how much couldn't be repaired? I suspect
anything done on a flight could be restored just fine.

There's definitely a ship of theseus aspect with artifacts. I imagine most of
things of this class have been worked over many times. Adding another layer of
damage and restoration to bring it back to its rightful home seems like a
reasonable price.

------
gxs
This is an interesting problem, not just in this case, but going forward.

Fast forward 100 years. I imagine we'll still be having these disputes then
when these artifacts are even more fragile.

It's a very real possibility that this becomes a limitation - even if not in
this case, I imagine it can a 100% legitimate reason in others. In those
cases, is it really a lost cause? I guess those nations just have to come to
terms with this reality.

------
oh_sigh
The solution to get these artifacts returned is simple: A disorganized group
simply needs to vow to destroy one cultural artifact of Austria at the time
and place of their choosing until the head dress and other artifacts are
returned.

~~~
kobeya
WTF? Seriously? This kind of thinking doesn't help anybody.

A more reasonable solution: agree to the return in 50 years time. That
provides sufficient time for even a reasonably funded small team to study the
problem, design solutions and create the necessary technology (e.g. a macro-
scale container with MEMS-rebalancing to smooth out even the smallest
vibrations), while still providing a hard date with no back-outs. In the mean
time, entrance to the museum or collection containing it is free or discounted
to anyone carrying a Mexican passport.

That took me all of 3 seconds of serious thought to come up. We solve problems
by working them, not acting on emotional responses.

~~~
oh_sigh
Sure it does - as I said, I bet the artifacts would be returned very quickly,
and then we would find out that vibrations were not actually as big of an
issue as claimed it would be.

But hey, at least Austria is trying to think of a valid excuse for keeping the
artifact. Unlike, say, the Elgin marbles and the UK.

