Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Victor Wolfgang von Hagen

American explorer

Date of Birth: 29-Feb-1908

Place of Birth: St. Louis, Missouri, United States

Date of Death: 08-Mar-1985

Profession: writer, historian, author, archaeologist, anthropologist, explorer

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Pisces


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About 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 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).

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