39 Facts About Zelia Nuttall

Zelia Maria Magdalena Nuttall was an American archaeologist and anthropologist who specialised in pre-Aztec Mexican cultures and pre-Columbian manuscripts.

Zelia Nuttall discovered two forgotten manuscripts of this type in private collections, one of them being the Codex Zouche-Nuttall.

Zelia Nuttall decoded the Aztec calendar stone and was one of the first to identify and recognise artefacts dating back to the pre-Aztec period.

Zelia Nuttall boldly proposed that Drake had sailed further North into the Pacific Northwest.

Zelia Nuttall was born in San Francisco, California, on September 6,1857, the second of six children to Irish father Robert Kennedy Zelia Nuttall, a physician, and Mexican-American mother Magdalena Parrott.

Zelia Nuttall's grandfather was John Parrott, one of San Francisco's richest bankers.

Zelia Nuttall became an excellent linguist, fluent in four languages and conversant in others.

The couple married in 1880 and Zelia Nuttall traveled with her husband while he conducted research in the West Indies, France, and Spain.

In 1884 Zelia Nuttall made her first trip to Mexico where she spent five months with her mother's wealthy family.

Zelia Nuttall demonstrated the figures were older than previously thought and used in funerary practices.

Zelia Nuttall was admitted to the Archaeological Institute of America and the equally acclaimed American Philosophical Society.

In 1886, Zelia Nuttall traveled with her brother to Europe and established her home in Dresden, Germany.

Zelia Nuttall spent the next twelve years searching libraries and museums throughout Europe for information on the history of Mexico.

Zelia Nuttall found the manuscript in a private library of Baron Zouche in England.

Zelia 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.

In 1901, Zelia Nuttall published her largest academic work, The Fundamental Principles of New and Old World Civilizations.

Zelia Nuttall 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.

Under Hearst's sponsorship, Zelia Nuttall joined a mission to Russia organized by the University of Pennsylvania to collect ethnographic materials for their museum.

In 1901 Hearst sponsored the establishment of an anthropology department and museum at the University of California, Berkeley, and invited Zelia Nuttall to serve on the organizing committee.

In 1902 Zelia Nuttall returned to Mexico and worked under the auspices of the new Berkeley anthropology department.

Zelia Nuttall studied Mexican garden art, grew medicinal herbs, and collected seeds of ancient Mexican food plants with the intention of introducing them into the United States.

Zelia Nuttall assisted in the introduction of taro cultivation in Orizaba.

In 1908, while doing research in the National Archives of Mexico, Zelia Nuttall came across a previously unknown manuscript relating to the voyage of Francis Drake's circumnavigation.

Zelia Nuttall summarized her thesis in a paper, "The Northern Limits of Drake's Voyage in the Pacific", delivered at the Panama-Pacific Historical Congress in 1915.

Zelia Nuttall found several manuscripts and maps that led her to conclude that Drake was not on the California coast.

Zelia Nuttall found important incongruities between the ethnographic descriptions of the people living near the careening site as described by Drake and his crew, and the cultures of the Miwok and Pomo people.

In 1916 Zelia Nuttall traveled to the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Vancouver Island and Washington State to confirm some details of Drake's travels.

Zelia Nuttall was active in Mexican archaeology for most of her career, but her only attempt to direct a large archaeological project, on Isla de Sacrificios, Mexico, was thwarted by Leopoldo Batres, Mexico's inspector of monuments.

Zelia Nuttall published a full account of the incident in the American Anthropologist in 1910.

Zelia Nuttall died on April 12,1933, at her home near Mexico City.

Zelia 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.

Zelia Nuttall investigated Mexico's past to give recognition and pride to its present at a time where Western archaeology favoured salacious narratives of ancient Mesoamericans.

In 1897, Zelia Nuttall published Ancient Mexican Superstitions in The Journal of American Folklore.

Outside of her work in anthropology and archaeology, Zelia Nuttall, partnered with Phoebe Hearst, worked to educate and preserve the heritage of indigenous Mexicans.

Zelia Nuttall advocated for the revival of Mexican traditions that had been eradicated during the Spanish conquest.

Zelia Nuttall was sent to Russia in 1894 as a representative of the Penn Museum to establish exchanges with Russian museums and offer financial assistance to Russian archaeological excavations in exchange for a share of their discoveries.

The opportunity for Zelia Nuttall to attend the coronation of Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna opened when noted philanthropist Phoebe Hearst cancelled her trip to the coronation, and passed the opportunity to the Penn Museum, along with the funds to defray travel expenses and acquire collections.

Zelia Nuttall acquired a photograph collection illustrating customs of the Kyrgyz people from the vicinity of Tashkent and Samarkand.

Zelia Nuttall was known for her ability to find lost or forgotten manuscripts and bring them to the attention of scholars.