Women in Anthropology: ZELIA MARIA MAGDALENA NUTTALL
Zelia Nuttall was a Mexican-American archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and linguist known for challenging the existing perceptions and narratives of Indigenous -Mexican history and archaeology during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
She was born in San Francisco in 1875 to a Mexican born mother and an Irish father. She grew up in relative wealth and was educated at Bedford College in London. In Europe she cultivated her language abilities, especially in Spanish, German, and Russian. She married a French archaeologist and had a daughter, but divorced him in 1888 and turned her focus on her own career.
Nuttall began working for the National Museum of Anthropology, in Mexico City in 1884. It was here where she started studying the site of Teotihuacan and centered her research on small terracotta heads. She was able to date these to the Aztec period (1345-1521 CE), and determine that they were likely representations of deceased individuals (pictured below from her work “The Terracotta Heads of Teotihuacan”). This work eventually led to her receiving a position within the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard.
During the 1890s she became good friends with renowned patron of anthropology, Phoebe Hearst who is well known for being the namesake of the UC Berkeley Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Hearst became a benefactor for Nuttall and often helped to fund her research.
Nuttall permanently moved to Mexico in 1902 and started working on pre-columbian manuscripts. Her most prominent work was on the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, a 14th century Mixtec manuscript that she helped to translate and analyze (pictured below). This codex was a facsimile, or recreation, of the actual deerskin book and it contained many scenes and narrative of Mixtec religion and culture.
*Brief aside: It is important to note that almost almost all the words that describe Indigenous peoples in the Americas (including the term America named for Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci) are rooted in a colonial history. Terms such as ‘pre-columbian’ or ‘Latin-American’ are quite widely used throughout all academic literature, but it is still important to acknowledge their origins and understand why they can be problematic.
Nuttall strove to be an advocate for Indigenous Mexican traditions and worked to change their perceptions in archaeology. In 1928, Mexico held its first celebration of the Indigenous New Year since 1519. She passed away 5 years later in Coyoacán, Mexico.
Anthropology has a large history of racist methodologies and the common narrative toward pre-contact Mexican cultures cast Indigenous peoples as ‘savages’. While many white anthropologists and archaeologists of the time viewed Native Mexican peoples and cultures as “primitive”, Nuttall understood them as equals and as people that were intelligent and complex.
It is necessary to note that her ideology is flawed and born out of a 19th century mindset. She thought about her archaeological work in an idealized and romantic way, championing the concept that all humans can share and benefit from the shared heritage of Ancient Mexico. While the sentiment is nice, it is important to remember that it is generally not the place of western scientists to have autonomy over the knowledge of ancient cultures. It is disrespectful to try and push this type of universal narrative, and instead Indigenous communities and peoples should have their own decisions on the knowledge of their ancestral cultures.
That being said, there is something incredibly important in the way anthropology and archaeology is articulated through the perspective of a woman of color. Zelia Nuttall diverged from the traditional way her male contemporaries viewed the ancient Mexican cultures and she was revolutionary in the field of Mexican archaeology. Though some of her ideologies are outdated now, she was essential in changing the legacy of colonist mindsets toward Indigenous cultures.
TOZZER, ALFRED M. “ZELIA NUTTALL”. American Anthropologist, vol 35, no. 3, 1933, pp. 475-482. Wiley, doi:10.1525/aa.1933.35.3.02a00070. Accessed 23 Mar 2021.
“The Archaeologist Who Helped Mexico Find Glory In Its Indigenous Past”. Smithsonian Magazine, 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/archaeologist-who-helped-mexico-find-glory-its-past-180970700/.
Nuttall, Zelia. “The Terracotta Heads Of Teotihuacan”. The American Journal Of Archaeology And Of The History Of The Fine Arts, vol 2, no. 2, 1886, p. 157. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/495843.
“Zelia Nuttall - Wikipedia”. En.Wikipedia.Org, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelia_Nuttall.
“Codex | British Museum”. The British Museum, 2021, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am1902-0308-1.
“Zelia Nuttall – Phoebe A. Hearst Museum Of Anthropology”. Phoebe A. Hearst Museum Of Anthropology, 2021, https://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu/zelia-nuttall/.
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