Page 299 - The Secret Museum

THIS INTRICATE SHIELD, MADE FROM 14,000 fragments of turquoise, is one of the most

exquisite things I have ever seen. It is quite small, only 31.8 centimetres in diameter
(about the size of a pizza), but its impact is impressive. The shield shimmers, even
here in the high-security vault in the storage facility of the National Museum of the
American Indian.

The Aztecs commissioned its creation. When they used it in ceremonies to
venerate their ancestors, it must have been spectacular. Each of the 28 holes around
the outside would have contained an eagle feather. Imagine it, held high, surrounded
by people drumming, singing and celebrating.

The shield wasn’t made by the Aztecs but by Mixtec craftsmen, with turquoise

pieces sourced from far and wide, perhaps in exchange for parrot and macaw
feathers. It was made to order. The Aztecs were in charge at the time, a full century
before the Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century. They demanded tribute from
their subjects, including the highly skilled Mixtec people (who also made the lienzo
stored in the Royal Ontario Museum).

We don’t know what happened to it next. It disappeared for centuries, until, some
time between 1906 and 1908 when a respected German botanist named Carl Albert
Purpus (1851–1941) was out looking for plants near Acatlan, in Puebla, Mexico, and

wandered into a cave. There he unwittingly found a treasure trove of Mixtec
turquoise creations – this shield, several less striking ones and some ritual masks.

The shield (and other artefacts) came to the attention of George Gustav Heye,
founder of the National Museum of the American Indian’s predecessor, the private
Heye Foundation Museum in New York City, in 1920. George Heye sent Marshall H.
Saville, a well-known scholar and a member of the museum staff, to Mexico to meet
Purpus, evaluate his collection and arrange for its purchase and shipment to New
York.

The shield has been in storage since Heye’s collection became the National
Museum of the American Indian. It can’t be hung permanently on exhibition because

the turquoise pieces have a tendency to fall off. The glue holding them in place is
centuries old. The sound of 400-year-old turquoise tinkling as it hits the museum
floor is not what any museum curator wants to hear.

I visited the shield on the same day I saw the spacesuits (the two museum storage
facilities are a short drive away from one another). I met Pat Neitfield, the
collections manager of the National Museum of the American Indian, and she took me
to see it.

On our way to find the shield we walked up through three storeys of artefacts.
There were shelves holding kayaks, canoes and reed boats, the way rowing boats are

stored in a boatshed. Nearby were headdresses, clothing and several totem poles
made by the Haida, Tlingit and Kwakiutl peoples of British Columbia and south-
eastern Alaska.