I was reading on Wikipedia about the Mayan Civlization and read the following quote:
Maya warriors wore body armour in the form of quilted cotton that had been soaked in salt water to toughen it; the resulting armour compared favourably to the steel armour worn by the Spanish when they conquered the region.
This doesn't make sense to me. In this article I found on the web, they make the claim that the Spanish actually began to abandon steel armor to fight in these Mayan armor because it was considered superior.
Europeans used quilted textile armor in the later middle ages, made of multiple layers of linen. This quilted material worked similarly to modern Kevlar, and modern tests have found that these armors can offer very effective protection against cuts. A sword blow will easily slice through the outer most layers of fabric, but these garments could be a dozen or more layers thick, and it's very challenging to cut through that many layers of cloth in a single strike. Textile armor appears to have offered reasonable protection against arrows as well, if modern experiments are any fair guide.
Here is a depiction of late medieval soldiers wearing a mix of metal and textile armor.
Consequently, when the Spanish arrived in the New World and found locals wearing quilted textile armor, this would not have been an especially surprising technology.
