Zelia Maria Magdalena Nuttall (September 6, 1857 – April 12, 1933) was an American archaeologist and anthropologist who specialised in pre-Aztec Mexican cultures and pre-Columbian manuscripts. She discovered two forgotten manuscripts of this type in private collections, one of them being the Codex Zouche-Nuttall. She decoded the Aztec calendar stone and was one of the first to identify and recognise artefacts dating back to the pre-Aztec period. Nuttall can also be credited for being first to ever challenge the prevailing theory of a California landing for Francis Drake's circumnavigation in spite of much adversity. She boldly proposed that Drake had sailed further North into the Pacific Northwest. Numerous northern coast researchers reexamined the few available records as a result.
Biography
Nuttall was born in San Francisco, California, on September 6, 1857, the second of six children to Irish father Robert Kennedy Nuttall, a physician, and Mexican-American mother Magdalena Parrott. Her grandfather was John Parrott, one of San Francisco's richest bankers. When she was eight, the family moved to Europe where she was educated in France, Germany, Italy, and Bedford College in London. Nuttall became an excellent linguist, fluent in four languages and conversant in others.
When the family returned to San Francisco in 1879, she met the French ethnologist, Alphonse Pinart, who was in the city on an ethnological mission for the French government. The couple married in 1880 and Zelia traveled with her husband while he conducted research in the West Indies, France, and Spain. A year later they separated just before the birth of their daughter. They formally divorced in 1888 on the grounds of Pinart's cruelty and neglect of Zelia, and Zelia and her daughter returned to her maiden name. At the time of her divorce she also left the Catholic Church.
In 1884 Nuttall made her first trip to Mexico where she spent five months with her mother's wealthy family. During her stay she developed a life-long interest in Mexican history and archaeology. In 1886 she published her first professional article, "Terra Cotta Heads of Teotihuacan" for the American Journal of Archaeology. Nuttall demonstrated the figures were older than previously thought and used in funerary practices. The paper was well received by professionals in the field. She was admitted to the Archaeological Institute of America and the equally acclaimed American Philosophical Society. Frederic Ward Putnam, curator of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, named her special assistant in Mexican archaeology, an honorary post she held for forty-seven years.
thumb|Feather Piece; Head-dress (Standard) preserved at Ethnographical Museum, Vienna|355x355px
In 1886, Nuttall traveled with her brother to Europe and established her home in Dresden, Germany. She spent the next twelve years searching libraries and museums throughout Europe for information on the history of Mexico. One of her most important finds was a pre-Columbian document of Mixtec pictographs, now known as the Codex Nuttall. She found the manuscript in a private library of Baron Zouche in England. Nuttall was unable to acquire the codex but hired an artist to make a careful copy which was published by the Peabody Museum in 1902. Another important discovery was the Codex Magliabecchiano, which she published in 1903 under the title The Book of the Life of the Ancient Mexicans with an introduction, translation, and commentary. Her claim of discovery was later disputed by a European scholar who reported his find somewhat earlier, but it was Nuttall who publicized the document and made it accessible to a broad audience.
In 1901, Nuttall published her largest academic work, The Fundamental Principles of New and Old World Civilizations. Although well received at the time, some of her theories were incorrect. She argued that seafaring Phoenicians sailed to the Americas and as a result of this influence, Meso-American civilizations had developed in parallel with those in Egypt and the Middle East. Archaeologists have since rejected this idea.
In 1902 Nuttall returned to Mexico and worked under the auspices of the new Berkeley anthropology department. Hearst provided funds to purchase a large Spanish colonial mansion in the upscale Mexico City suburb of Coyoacán. Her home, which she renamed Casa de Alvarado, became her archaeological headquarters, laboratory and a meeting place for scientists and intellectuals. D. H. Lawrence was one of her house guests and he purportedly based his character Mrs. Norris in The Plumed Serpent after Nuttall.
Nuttall was a member of several academic institutions, including the Harvard Peabody Museum and the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City and she carried out most of her activities without pay and on a fee-for-service basis. In 1895, she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.
Defence of Mesoamerican cultures
Nuttall investigated Mexico's past to give recognition and pride to its present at a time when Western archaeology favoured salacious narratives of ancient Mesoamericans. In 1897, Nuttall published Ancient Mexican Superstitions in The Journal of American Folklore. In it, she criticised the representation of ancient Mexicans as "bloodthirsty savages, having nothing in common with civilised humanity". "Such a hold upon the imagination that it effaces all other knowledge about the ancient civilisation of Mexico", she wrote. She hoped her work would "lead to a growing recognition of the bonds of universal brotherhood which unite the present inhabitants of this great and ancient continent to their not unworthy predecessors."
Outside of her work in anthropology and archaeology, Nuttall, partnered with Phoebe Hearst, worked to educate and preserve the heritage of indigenous Mexicans. One of her students was Manuel Gamio, who would eventually become one of Mexico's most famous archaeologists.
Nuttall advocated for the revival of Mexican traditions that had been eradicated during the Spanish conquest. In 1928, she called for a renewed celebration of the indigenous New Year, which was traditionally observed twice annually by numerous Mesoamerican cultures. That year, Mexico City celebrated the Aztec New Year for the first time since 1519.
While Nuttall was in Moscow to attend the coronation, she set up several exchanges between Russian museums and the Penn Museum. In addition, she visited the Pan-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition at Nizhny Novgorod, where she inspected numerous artifacts from regions as distant as Siberia, and collected more than 400 items from Russia, Finland, Poland, and Russian Turkestan. The artifacts included religious objects, musical instruments, pottery, color lithographs of the 1894 Russian coronation ceremony, and more. She also acquired a photograph collection illustrating customs of the Kyrgyz people from the vicinity of Tashkent and Samarkand.
- In 1890, she identified in the National Central Library of Florence the Codex Magliabecchiano, which she published in 1903 through the University of California under the title The Book of the Life of the Ancient Mexicans. On that occasion, she entered into conflict with the Duke of Loubat, who published it in 1904 without crediting her with the discovery.
- In 1911, she found at the National Library of Spain the unfinished text of Francisco Cervantes de Salazar's Crónica de la Nueva España, dating from about 1560 and tracing the history of the conquest of Mexico. This was published in 1914
- She discovered a manuscript in National Library at Madrid relating to the prevention and cure of plague in Spain in 1600–1601. This was published in English translation in 1912
- She collected the manuscripts of Francis Drake and John Hawkins contained in the National Archives of Mexico, as well as in collections in New York, Spain, Italy, France and England (Bodleian Library, British Museum and Public Archives of London). The set was published in 1914 by the Hakluyt Society of London under the title A New Light on Drake. To complete the work, she traveled in 1916 to the Juan de Fuca Strait between Vancouver Island and Washington State to confirm the details of Drake's travels.