The Scale Armour

Way back in undergraduate school, I was working at the Nebraska History Museum part time in their Collections office learning the ropes of curation, cataloging, and collections management. It was a great introduction to doing history IRL. I was one of the lean minions - I got to help with special projects like inventories and object photography. I now hate dolls. I don’t want to talk about it.

My mentor at school, Dr. Peter Bleed, was an old archaeological hand in the area. He kindly sheparded my fool self through the very beginnings of my interest in professional history/archaeology/architecture/museum work. He led my archaeology field school, taking too much delight in getting students covered in mud and dirt; he also taught me how to knap stone tools! With minimal blood! One day, he contacted my twin sister and me (no, we don’t look alike) about a potential project with the NHM and the Nebraska State Historical Society. They had found a set of scale armour in their basement storage areas. And they had no idea how it got there or where it really came from. All the information they had came from its donation to the museum in the early 1900s. It was donated by a local judge who had been gifted the armour from a friend. This friend, John Bourke served in the frontier army along the Arizona/Mexico border in the 1870s, he got the armour from another friend who apparently found the armour in a Texan cave shrouding a skeleton. 

We never did truly figure out what the armour was, where it came from, or how old it was. We had the fabric analyzed, we the armour carbon dated, we had the iron scales analyzed. But we never discovered precisely the answer. We thought at first the story about discovering a 16th century set of armour on a skeleton was pretty apocryphal, until we discovered that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a disarticulated set of scales from the same region which matched our scales exactly. One day I will go see them to further the comparison. So we knew the armour would have been found in Texas, in the 1870s. That gave us a geographical area to work with and a latest possible date. When we had the fabrics analyzed, we learned it was unlikely to have been machine made, supporting a date pre-1870, but the fabrics were otherwise pretty generic with no specific elements to give us further clues. We then shipped off a loose scale to the University of Arizona for metallurgical analysis. We discovered the scales would have been cut or stamped out of a plate of iron. There were a significant amount of slag inclusions suggesting the iron was smelted in a bloomery furnace. This analysis matched the MET’s armour as well. Bloomery iron is less ‘pure’ than wrought iron, or pig iron. So, we could hypothesize again a date pre-mid-1800s, but since there isn’t a lot of work done in the Southwest in relation to industrial work, we cannot know if there was bloomery iron manufacturing in the area at any time before the 1870s although it would certainly be within the skill set of frontier blacksmith to make. On the other hand, if the armour was very old - think Spanish conquistadors, then we can assume that the iron was made in the Basque region of Spain. This region was the main producer of iron for Spain and there is evidence of the use of bloomery furnaces there. We then attempted to carbon date the fabric in the armour… It came back with something like a 90% chance it was made between 1665 and 1950. So helpful. But, that actually cuts out some of the earliest Spanish expeditions in the area, and we already knew it was in John Bourke’s hands by the 1870s. So at the end of all the scientific analysis we had discovered the armour was made of generic fabrics and rough iron sometime between 1665 and 1870. 

We then decided to look more closely at the MET’s set of scales. They were found in the 1920s near Aztec, New Mexico. 6 of about 325 scales were donated to the MET in the 1990s. Many of the scales matched the same size as our ‘shield’ shape, and while no fabric survives, evidence of bolts and rivets like our armour suggest a similar original construction making the two sets remarkably similar. The authors of two papers for this MET armour also had their scales analyzed at the University of Arizona, but in the 1990s. They were also made of bloomery iron, were the same thickness, and had nearly identical rivets! However, they were also stumped by the true history of their armour.

We next decided to extrapolate some theories ourselves, using the MET’ armour as supplementary evidence. We first proposed the idea that the armours were made by the Spanish and used during their expeditions in the 17th century. However, scale armour fell out of favour in Europe by the end of the 15th century. We knew the Spanish quickly shed the use of plate armour in the New World due to the heat in the region, but they seemed to have preferred the use of leather armour, or occasionally chainmaille instead. Our scale armours also don’t seem to really match examples from the same time period in other parts of the world: North Africa and East Asia. 

Then we discovered that some operas actually used metal scale in their costumes! There is photographic documentation proving the creation of scales was something done in the 19th century in the US, but as to the likelihood fancy operatic scale armour could make it to the relatively unpopulated Southwest before 1870… seems a little fanciful.

And a hard right into conspiracy theories. It also turns out that the Masons used armours and costumes, too. These would have spread widely across North America during the 1800s, and most notably, the friend who found our armor? He was actually a Mason. 

The theory that ended up holding the most water was the idea that the armour was worn by a Plains warrior. There are actually a lot of stories about men riding to fight the Mexican or American armies while wearing ‘iron shirts’ or ‘fish scales,’ etc which were supposed to be impervious to arrows. These stories come from the Comanches, Apaches, Cheyenne, and others, not just Europeans. We were even notified when a book of drawings from the early-mid 19th century was up for auction which depicted a warrior riding to battle while wearing a garment that looks just like fish scales. There is even a photograph of a Cheyenne warrior named Alights on the Cloud wearing something that is definitely made of metal scales. 

So, finally the Scale Armour really turned out to be a project about many questions. I hope one day to return to this work to see if any further research has been done, maybe I’ll even be able to get into some archives to see primary documents referencing the armour worn by Native American warriors. I love these sorts of challenges though, they’re like a puzzle and are never truly finished. Stay tuned, dear reader, I’ll get this one off the back burner at some point. 

And if anyone knows anything about this, email me right now.

Last Updated: January 12, 2021