Zelia Nuttall, another forgotten woman archaeologist

 She found it in a dusty English manor in 1899.

A manuscript. Painted on deerskin. Folded like an accordion. Covered in pictographs that nobody had bothered to decipher because they thought it was a children's book.

She looked closer.

And realized she was holding one of only sixteen pre-Columbian Mexican manuscripts that had survived the conquest. A thousand-year-old chronicle of kings, wars, and dynasties—hidden in plain sight for centuries.

Her name was Zelia Nuttall. She was born in San Francisco in 1857 to an Irish father and a Mexican mother. And she was about to revolutionize everything we knew about the Aztecs.

At a time when women couldn't even vote, when universities wouldn't admit them, when the entire field of archaeology was a gentlemen's club that considered "lady anthropologists" to be amusing curiosities at best—she taught herself multiple languages, traveled alone across Europe searching archives, and became one of the most respected Mesoamerican scholars in the world.

She never had a PhD. She never held an official university position. She was a divorced single mother supporting herself and her daughter by selling artifacts to museums and publishing research on a freelance basis.

And she changed history anyway.

Her breakthrough came in 1884, on her second trip to Mexico. While other archaeologists ignored them as "puzzling novelties," she collected small terra-cotta heads near Teotihuacan and wrote a paper demonstrating they were older than anyone realized—evidence of pre-Aztec cultures that predated everything scholars thought they knew.

The paper was published in 1886 in the American Journal of Archaeology. The response was immediate. Frederic Ward Putnam, curator of Harvard's Peabody Museum, offered her an honorary position as special assistant in Mexican archaeology.

She would hold that position for forty-seven years—until the day she died.

But she wasn't interested in honorary titles. She wanted answers. She wanted to prove that Mesoamerican civilizations were as sophisticated, as advanced, as brilliant as ancient Greece or Rome.

So she went looking.

She combed through archives in Florence, Madrid, London—anywhere Spanish conquistadors might have stashed looted manuscripts after destroying thousands more. In 1890, she found the Codex Magliabecchiano in a library in Florence. In 1899, she discovered the manuscript that would bear her name: the Codex Nuttall, now called Codex Zouche-Nuttall, residing in the British Museum.

It was extraordinary. Forty-seven leaves of painted deerskin, recording the genealogies and conquests of Mixtec rulers from the 11th and 12th centuries. The entire biography of a warrior-king named Eight Deer Jaguar Claw, who had died at fifty-two, centuries before Columbus ever sailed.

She published a facsimile in 1902, meticulously supervising every detail of reproduction. And suddenly, the world could see what she saw: that these weren't primitive scribbles. They were sophisticated historical records, as complex as any European chronicle.

But her most radical work was on the Aztec calendar itself.

Everyone knew the Aztecs had a calendar stone—a massive circular carving weighing twenty-five tons, covered in intricate symbols. But nobody had fully decoded it. Colonial scholars dismissed it. Victorian archaeologists were baffled by it.

Zelia Nuttall became the first person to accurately decipher it.

She proved that the Aztecs used two interlocking calendars: a 365-day solar calendar called the xiuhpohualli, and a 260-day ritual calendar called the tonalpohualli. Every fifty-two years, the two calendars would align perfectly—a "calendar round"—marked by the New Fire Ceremony, when all fires in the empire were extinguished and relit to symbolize cosmic renewal.

This wasn't primitive superstition. This was mathematics. This was astronomy. This was a civilization tracking celestial movements with such precision that their calendar required no leap year—it self-corrected through the five "nameless days" that bridged each solar cycle.

She published her findings in 1894 and again in 1904, responding to critics who couldn't believe indigenous Americans could have developed such sophisticated systems independently.

They could. And she proved it.

In 1905, she made a decision that set her apart from every other foreign archaeologist of her era: she moved to Mexico permanently. She purchased a sixteenth-century mansion in Coyoacán called Casa Alvarado and made it her home. While her colleagues extracted artifacts and returned to universities in Europe and America, she stayed. She learned Nahuatl. She mentored Mexican archaeologists, including Manuel Gamio, who would become one of Mexico's most famous scholars.

She didn't just study Mexico's past. She fought to preserve its living heritage.

In 1895, she became the seventh woman—and first anthropologist—elected to the American Philosophical Society. But even as accolades accumulated, she faced constant skepticism. Male colleagues questioned her methods. Institutions blocked her from leading excavations. When she finally secured funding for a dig on Isla de Sacrificios, Mexico's inspector of monuments pushed her aside and appointed himself director instead.

She published a scathing account of the incident in 1910. But she kept working.

Near the end of her life, she did something extraordinary. In 1928, she called for Mexico City to celebrate the Aztec New Year—a tradition that had been suppressed since 1519, the year Cortés arrived. For the first time in over four hundred years, the capital celebrated.

It was a reclamation. A resurrection. A refusal to let conquest be the final word.

She died on April 12, 1933, at Casa Alvarado. She was seventy-five years old. Per her instructions, all her personal papers were destroyed—we'll never know what she wrote in those final years, what theories she developed, what discoveries she made but never published.

The Mexican government seized her home for unpaid taxes. Her library was sold to pay debts. For decades, her contributions were footnoted, minimized, attributed to male colleagues who had built on her work.

But the manuscripts remain. The codices she found, decoded, and published. The calendar system she deciphered. The evidence she compiled that Mesoamerican civilizations possessed scientific knowledge equal to any in the ancient world.

The Codex Nuttall is in the British Museum.

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- History Nerds HQ

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Replica of Aztec Calendar Wheel

Sharing with Sepia Saturday

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Wikipedia gives this bio...more is included on their site, including sources.

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.

Frederic Putnam and German-American anthropologist Franz Boas saw her as an excellent mediator between Americanist circles in different countries because of her education and cosmopolitan relations. In his 1886 annual report for the museum, Putnam praised Nuttall as "familiar with the Nahuatl language, having intimate and influential friends among the Mexicans, and with an exceptional talent for linguistics and archaeology." Her family background made her an ideal partner for relations with Mexico. This would play an important role in the creation of the institution of international cooperation International School of American Archeology and Ethnology in Mexico.

Feather Piece; Head-dress (Standard) preserved at Ethnographical Museum, Vienna^[11]

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.

During one of her trips back to California, Nuttall met the wealthy philanthropist, Phoebe Hearst. Hearst became a friend, patron, and an important influence in Nuttall's career. Under Hearst's sponsorship, 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 Nuttall to serve on the organizing committee.

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 near Mexico City. 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 developed a passion for gardening at Casa Alvarado. She 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. She also assisted in the introduction of taro cultivation in Orizaba.

Nuttall died on April 12, 1933, at her home near Mexico City. Per her instructions, all of her personal papers were destroyed. The Mexican government seized her residence as payment for taxes and her extensive library was sold to pay off debts.

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.