He was awarded his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1953, and after obtaining a Fulbright Scholarship for further study in Rome, began his academic career at Yale University in 1954.
It was as a child at the Peacock Military Academy in San Antonio, Texas that Buttrey first encountered, and became interested in, the coins of Mexico.
This followed earlier, apparently uncontroversial, work in which he was able to identify certain Mexican gold bars as counterfeit, primarily by cataloguing anachronistic assayer markings.
That earlier work was capped by Buttrey's 1973 talk, "False Mexican Colonial Gold Bars" at the International Numismatic Congress.
"[3] There is no question that Ford and Stack's sold a number of the disputed gold bars to collector and philanthropist Josiah K. Lilly Jr. Lilly's extensive collection of gold and coins, including the disputed bars, was donated to the Smithsonian Institution after his death in 1966 in exchange for a multimillion-dollar tax break for his estate.
[3] In 1999, Michael Hodder, a consultant for Stack's, attempted to rebut the claims that Buttrey laid out in his 1996 ANS lecture.
[1] Coin World magazine wrote later that it "was one of the most heavily attended numismatic events at an ANA convention".
[1] Buttrey provided evidence of what he called fraud to the office of the Attorney General of New York State, but no criminal charges were ever filed against Ford or Stack's.
[citation needed] Buttrey was awarded the Medal of the Royal Numismatic Society in 1983[4] and served as its President in the years 1989–1993.
In 2011, the "Institut für Numismatik und Geldgeschichte" of Vienna University, Austria, awarded him the Wolfgang Hahn Medal.