For over a decade a convenient untruth, masked as scientific fact, has held a particularly desirable object in place. The Aztec featherheaddress was announced to be too fragile in a report published in 2012.[1] The scientific basis of this report was never made public and was commissioned directly from the Austrian state museum. It had an undeniably political formation and intent to prove the untransportability of this piece, under scrutiny in a bilateral research project.
In the process of researching my book The Contested Crown I interviewed Prof. Wassermann who was commissioned to write the 2012 engineering report on the transportation of the Aztec featherwork.[2] However, my interview was only possible after he received permission from the museum to speak to me about it. So, while his scientific reports were then also shared with me, an air of secrecy accompanied and continues to accompany the case because the risk assessments have never been transparent. Our new research offers a reappraisal of the old risk assessment, its scientific basis and proposal for state of the art transportation. This article is a simple summary of research that has taken me some years, finally to find those conservation and engineering experts who can explain what was missing from the original study and what technology could be used to safely transport this piece from Vienna to Mexico.[3]
The engineering data in what follows is researched by Dr. Kerstin Kracht, a leading expert in designing vibration-reducing and shock-absorbing measures in a museum environment, including transport.[4] She has years of experience in creating similar transportation means for objects from institutions including the British Museum, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam. In the 2012 report, passive and active springs or ‘damper elements’ are said to be unable to bring about the desired vibration reduction and Dr. Kracht confirms that indeed even today, 11 years later, this is not possible. It is also true that passive elements such as rubber buffers or rubber-metal connections as well as rubber or foam mats are also unable to achieve the desired vibration isolation while simultaneously absorbing shock. However, Dr. Wassermann did not analyse the wire-rope isolators, which are used to transport everything from sensitive lasers to large devices such as computer tomographs, ship diesels and electron microscopes. The wire rope springs are also used for the storage of engines and systems in shipbuilding.
The original report made by Prof. Wassermann in 2012 is based on the arbitrarily set upper limit for the acceleration amplitudes of 0.04 g. However, no frequency range is specified, which means that this value is meaningless. In addition, it is not clear how this value came about, what load scenarios is it based on? Dr. Kracht points out to me that this limit value is therefore purely a guess, and hence my skepticism (gaslighted by the museum all these years) was justified. She also notes that since well-founded lifespan analysis of museum objects are not state of the art, the logic of the arguments about a limit value that is supposed to reflect what is reasonable for the object are not tenable. The question is rather what is technically feasible and what are the experiences with these technical solutions? That is, the state of the art in conservation now weighs the value of a repatriated item to the community with the potential physical damage in transportation, which often finds in favour of the community of claimants.
In Vienna, despite Dr Wassermann’s errors, his report was taken as hard scientific fact. Although the Mexican engineer, Dr. Alejandro Ramirez who was part of the binational commission, repeatedly complained about the claims that it was too fragile, saying that it was a political rather than scientific process.[5] The publication of the findings was delayed because certain members of the Mexican team did not agree with the conclusion. In the end they were also forced to allow the publication to go ahead.
There have been important recent precedents to the requested transport of the Aztec piece. Among others, a comparably fragile feather work was brought to Tahiti from the British Museum (Fig 1).[6] Tupaia’s mourning cloak, which was returned from the British Museum in 2023, was also part of a larger research project that I led based at the Royal Museum’s Greenwich in 2016-2018 and published as the Bloomsbury volume entitled Tupaia, Captain Cook and the Voyage of the Endeavour: A Material History.[7]
The British Museum transportation of Tupaia’s mourning cloak will be detailed in writing by the conservator Verena Kotonski in an upcoming publication on the British Museum’s blog. The significance of which is that using the box within a box system with wire-rope isolators from Germany, Dr. Kerstin Kracht and the conservation team at the British Museum were able to prepare safe passage for this piece in which nothing was damaged on route.
Another strong precedent case is that of the turban snail trophy, a fragile and multifaceted object that was transported between the SSGK Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in Germany and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art without damage.[8] The particular system in all these cases relies on an outer shell which buffers impact using special wire-rope isolators. These are fixed between it and an inner box. In the inner box the featherwork is securely stored. Any impact the outer crate receives is turned into a very gentle rocking motion by the vibration isolators. The materials used avoid any frictions. A risk assessment is carried out by the expert team by simulating specific shock scenarios, such as movements during land, air transportation and in-house transportation.
The significance of this research is that it shows a safe and feasible means of transportation of something that was falsely claimed to be impossible. It was surrounded in hyperbole, as in ‘until teleportation is possible a la star trek this piece cannot travel to Mexico’ said the previous director of the custodian museums in Vienna in a news interview. The cost of building the custom designed crate today is around 5000 euros. The technical drawings and tests have been done in our study. A prototype of this container is in planning – a decade after the Wassermann report we will build the vibration proof case, and it will be used in a variety of cultural actions in Mexico and Vienna as part of the Repatriates artistic-research project. It intends to demonstrate the fallacy of fragility by showing the ease with which this hurdle can be overcome. The technical journals in which this research has been published thus far are highly specialized and do not easily interface with public opinion, which is so easily shaped by the popular press and the politics against restitution. This pragmatic and effective piece of research into verifiable risk assessment is open access and available to anyone who would like to use it. Please contact the Primary investigator, Prof. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll at carrollk@ceu.edu should you wish to see and discuss the findings in more detail. They were made to assist the ongoing requests for repatriation by completing another missing piece in the puzzle of why the feather headdress has not returned to Mexico thus far.
[1] https://www.weltmuseumwien.at/der-federkopfschmuck/
Feest, Christian. 2012. Der altmexikanische Federkopfschmuck in Europa. In: Der altmexikanische Federkopfschmuck, Sabine Haag, Alfonso de María y Campos, Lilia Rivero Weber, Christian Feest (Hg.), Overath, Deutschland: ZKF Publishers. S. 5-28. https://www.academia.edu/39675846/Der_altmexikanische_Federkopfschmuck_in_Europa
[2] My fieldwork, especially at the Weltmuseum Wien, on this case of the Aztec feather headdress has been published as the Chicago University Press book – https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo116106417.html
[3] Thank-you to Sophie Rowe, Julie Adams, Lilia Rivero Weber, and Florian Rainer.
[4] https://smart-vibrations.net/dr-kracht/
[5] https://repatriates.org/mexico/bbc-podcast-the-price-for-mexican-heritage/
[6] https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/projects/protecting-collections-vibration-during-transport
https://britishmuseum.iro.bl.uk/concern/articles/032839c9-1dad-4f83-874b-b7e1506adfce?locale=en
[7] https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/tupaia-captain-cook-and-the-voyage-of-the-endeavour-9781350157491/
[8] Kracht, K., Baruth, K.: Wie ein Turbanschneckenpokal vom Schloss Güstrow nach New York reiste. Restauro 6/2020, S. 40-43. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kerstin-Kracht-2