In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall and the Search for Mexico's Ancient Civilizations

by Merilee Grindle

Overview

"What a woman! And what a fabulous life to unearth. Zelia Nuttall was incredibly smart, determined, a divorced single mother in a man’s world, a great scholar, and an original thinker—yet today she’s completely forgotten. Merilee Grindle has dug deep into the archives and uncovered her fascinating story."—Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature

"Zelia Nuttall comes alive in all her fascinating contradictions in Merilee Grindle’s capable hands...[This] biography challenges our modern smugness and reminds us that our roots as scholars are more complex than we often acknowledge."—Camilla Townsend, author of Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

The gripping story of a pioneering anthropologist whose exploration of Aztec cosmology, rediscovery of ancient texts, and passion for collecting helped shape our understanding of pre-Columbian Mexico.

Where do human societies come from? The drive to answer this question took on a new urgency in the nineteenth century, when a generation of archaeologists began to look beyond the bible for the origins of different cultures and civilizations. A child of the San Francisco Gold Rush whose mother was born in Mexico City, Zelia Nuttall threw herself into the study of Aztec customs and cosmology, eager to use the tools of the emerging science of anthropology to prove that modern Mexico was built over the ruins of ancient civilizations.

Proud, disciplined, as prickly as she was independent, Zelia Nuttall was the first person to accurately decode the Aztec calendar stone. An intrepid researcher, she found pre-Columbian texts lost in European archives and was skilled at making sense of their pictographic histories. Her work on the terra-cotta heads of Teotihuacán captured the attention of Frederic Putnam, who offered her a job at Harvard’s Peabody Museum.

Divorced and juggling motherhood and career, Nuttall chose to follow her own star, publishing her discoveries and collecting artifacts for US museums to make ends meet. From her beloved Casa Alvarado in Coyoacán, she became a vital bridge between Mexican and US anthropologists, connecting them against the backdrop of war and revolution.

The first biography of Zelia Nuttall, In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl captures the appeal and contradictions that riddled the life of this trailblazing woman, who contributed so much to the new field of anthropology until a newly professionalized generation overshadowed her remarkable achievements and she became, in the end, an artifact in her own museum.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674278349
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	11/07/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	581,816
File size:	25 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Merilee Grindle is the Edward S. Mason Professor of International Development, Emerita, at Harvard University and the former director of its David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. She served as president of the Latin American Studies Association and has written or contributed to over a dozen scholarly books.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Preface Introduction 1. A New City and an Old World 2. A Marriage Gone Wrong 3. Mentor and Disciple 4. New World Treasure and Glyphs on a Stone 5. Chicago Holds a Fair 6. A Museum in the Making 7. A University Takes Charge 8. At Home in Mexico 9. The Inspector’s Challenge 10. Of Sailors and Revolution 11. Empire and Pleasure Gardens 12. Tea with Lawrence 13. Persistence 14. Legacy Notes Bibliography Image Credits Index

Editorial Reviews

09/11/2023

Grindle (Bureaucrats, Politicians, and Peasants in Mexico), a professor of international development at Harvard, delivers an insightful and accessible biography of Zelia Nuttall (1857–1933), a pioneer in scholarly research on the ancient civilizations of Mexico. A protégé of renowned Harvard anthropologist Frederic Putnam, Nuttall worked as an anthropologist when very few women were employed in the field. An astute and intrepid researcher, she was the first person to accurately decipher the Aztec calendar stone; wrote a seminal study of the terra-cotta heads of Teotihuacán; and decoded the Codex Nuttall, a rare pre-Columbian manuscript that revealed much about early Mesoamerican art, literature, and history. Nuttall and her contemporaries created exhibits for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and were instrumental in the development of modern museums in Pennsylvania and California, ushering in a new era of cultural studies and appreciation. Despite her extensive travels, Nuttall’s lifelong love for Mexico never waned, and she eventually settled there and developed an expertise in the native plants of ancient Mexico. Grindle combines a rousing tale of archaeological discovery with an incisive description of how institutional marginalization occurs, tracing how Nuttall’s legacy was ignored by subsequent generations of anthropologists. This enjoyable account restores to prominence an influential figure in her field. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

[A] fascinating biography of Mexican-American anthropologist Zelia Nuttall…[whose work] helped shape the field of archaeology and the scientific study of the history of humankind in the Americas…Defying her cultural constrictions, she exerted a significant impact on the values and methodologies of institutions.

ReVista - Seonaid Valiant

As a teenager on a seemingly endless grand tour of Europe, Zelia Nuttall described her globe-trotting Californian family as ‘wanderers in the highway of nations.’ In Merilee Grindle’s deft telling, we see Nuttall grow into a brilliant and focused interpreter of the secrets of ancient nations, a founder of the modern science of anthropology, a bold female traveler on time’s highway whose life story illuminates our twenty-first-century struggle to apprehend the ravages of civilization.

Megan Marshall

Zelia Nuttall was the first anthropologist to accurately decipher the Aztec calendar stone. In this first published biography of the pioneering social scientist, Merilee Grindle examines the then-new field of anthropology, which employed few women. She explores how Nuttall’s dogged research contributed to our understanding of the history and culture of ancient Mexico.

Christian Science Monitor

Grindle does not allow discursions into Nuttall’s scholarly interests to slow down the strong narrative pace of her book. … Specialised knowledge of a particular profession provides captivating details as our protagonist navigates the events and personalities of world history.

History Today - Matthew Restall

Zelia Nuttall was a major figure in the rediscovery of ancient Mexico, yet today she is barely remembered. Merilee Grindle has marshaled an impressive amount of evidence to tell Nuttall’s story afresh and restore her to her rightful place in the annals of anthropology.

Toby Wilkinson

Zelia Nuttall comes alive in all her fascinating contradictions in Merilee Grindle’s capable hands. Nuttall came of age in the nineteenth century and thought nothing of removing Mexico’s antiquities, or supporting Porfirio Díaz. But she was also a world-traveling single mother who studied Nahuatl with a native speaker, convinced Franz Boas to take Mexican students, ferreted out a previously unknown pre-Columbian codex, made a leap forward in our understanding of the Mesoamerican calendar, and chose to spend her declining years in her beloved Mexico, her mother’s native country. Grindle’s biography challenges our modern smugness and reminds us that our roots as scholars are more complex than we often acknowledge.

Camilla Townsend

Grindle unearths the story of the pioneering anthropologist Zelia Nuttall, whose study of Aztec culture and cosmology transformed our understanding of pre-Columbian Mexico. She was the first to accurately decode the Aztec stone calendar, and also rediscovered countless pre-Columbian texts previously thought to have been lost—all the while juggling single motherhood with her career.

The Millions

This vibrant biography follows the complex, captivating figure of Zelia Nuttall, a self-taught scholar of ancient Mesoamerica and a pioneer of modern anthropology…Grindle paints an indelible portrait of a woman both charming and challenging, whose boldness could slip easily into imperiousness, and whose zeal could lead her astray.

New Yorker

What a woman! And what a fabulous life to unearth. Zelia Nuttall was incredibly smart, determined, a divorced single mother in a man’s world, a great scholar, and an original thinker—yet today she’s completely forgotten. Merilee Grindle has dug deep into the archives and uncovered her fascinating story.

Andrea Wulf

Zelia Nuttall was a pioneering anthropologist whose many contributions ranged from decoding a giant Aztec calendar to burnishing the reputation of the sixteenth-century English navigator Sir Francis Drake. In this beautifully crafted biography, Grindle situates Nuttall’s work in Mexico in the lead-up to the 1910 revolution. Her research helped Mexicans understand their pre-Columbian national heritage, in its sophisticated engineering, gardening, artistry, and cosmology, as being as glorious as that of Mediterranean societies in the classical era.

Foreign Affairs - Richard Feinberg

Even now Nuttall lacks widespread recognition, but Grindle’s passionate book, including extensive research in Mexico, will ensure that she is never forgotten.

British Museum Magazine - Andrew Robinson

08/01/2023

Grindle (emerita, Latin American studies, Harvard; Bureaucrats, Politicians and Peasants in Mexico) recounts the trailblazing story of archaeologist Zelia Nuttall (1857–1933). She was a highly intelligent U.S. scholar who refused to be bound by societal pressures and restrictions placed upon women. Fascinated by her mother's homeland of Mexico, Nuttall had many research interests that ranged from the voyages of Sir Francis Drake to her seminal work on the Aztec calendar system. She traveled extensively throughout the Americas and Europe, spending countless hours in libraries and museums pouring over colonial manuscripts, translating pre-Columbian codices, and making a close study of countless artifacts. Conversant in numerous languages and friends with intellectuals and wealthy donors—philanthropist/feminist Phoebe Hearst, for example—Nuttall and her work were influential. Sadly, as the decades passed, archaeology often overlooked one of its founding mothers. VERDICT This book does an exemplary job of conveying this distinctive story of a single mother who accomplished many wondrous things in a world and an era that were decidedly against her.—Brian Renvall

Library Journal