Zelia Nuttall

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.