Victor Wolfgang von Hagen

Victor Wolfgang von Hagen (St. Louis, Missouri, United States, February 29, 1908 – Italy, March 8, 1985) was an American explorer author, archaeological historian, naturalist and anthropologist who traveled in South America with his wife (Christine, later Sylvia). Mainly between 1940 and 1965, he published a large number of widely acclaimed books about the ancient people of the Inca, Maya, and Aztecs.

Victor von Hagen 1984 at Boggioli, Toscana

Victor Wolfgang von Hagen was born on February 29, 1908, in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Henry von Hagen and Eleanor Josephine (Stippe-Hornbach) Von Hagen. He attended Morgan Park Military Academy, a college preparatory school in Chicago. He then went to New York University, the San Francisco University of Quito, and the University of Göttingen. During World War II he served in the US Army, 13th Infantry.

His first book, Off With Their Heads (1937), was based on an eight-month stay with a tribe of head-hunters in Ecuador. He accompanied some of their war parties and witnessed the process of shrinking heads. Later he traveled through Honduras and Guatemala in search of the elusive quetzal, a bird once revered by the ancient Aztecs and Mayas. He recorded his experiences in his next book, Quetzal Quest: The Story of the Capture of the Quetzal, the Sacred Bird of the Aztecs and the Mayas (1939).

As a naturalist he was very knowledgeable of the Galapagos Islands and wrote the first comprehensive study of the giant tortoise. He was also an expert on the islands' plant life. Von Hagen was awarded the Orden de Merito by the Republic of Ecuador for his conservation work in the Galapagos.

In the early 1950s, he went for a two-year exploration of Peru's ancient Inca roads and found the only surviving suspension bridge of this trail.

His daughter, Adriana von Hagen, is co-director of a museum in Leimebamba (Peru).