Amanda Adams
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Nuttall was an exhibitor, and she presented a colorful spread of copied ornate codex pages, her own restoration of a Mexican calendar system, and paintings of Mexican feather shields. Boas was there as an arranger of the exhibits and as a collector.12 Both presented papers at the International Congress of Anthropology, which took place at the fair. Even in a carnival atmosphere, serious business had its place.
The relationship between Boas and Nuttall, sparked that festive year in Chicago, can be charted through a lifetime of letters exchanged thereafter. Together they worked to recruit bright minds to the cause of anthropology, with special interest in training not just the boys at Ivy League schools but also the relatively disadvantaged and indigenous locals who had a stake in preserving their own heritage. One of Nuttall’s later pet projects was to use all her connections and power to launch the training of a promising twenty-six-year-old man named Manuel Gamio from Mexico. She arranged for him to be funded and shipped abroad so that he could study with Boas at Columbia University in New York. Eventually Gamio returned to Mexico as the first well-trained archaeologist who could excavate scientifically and who would achieve lasting fame as the country’s most famous archaeologist. None of it would have been possible without Nuttall’s persistent work behind the scenes.
Perhaps most important, and what ties Nuttall, Boas, and Hearst together, was Nuttall’s pivotal role in laying the foundations for the future of American anthropology on the west coast. Hearst had money to spend and wanted to construct a permanent home for all of her anthropological finds. The University of California also had a strong desire to establish a cutting-edge anthropology program on its campus. The state had such a diversity of indigenous culture, so much history, and so many archaeological sites, and there was mounting anxiety that it had not yet been examined.13 California was the golden state, and it provided a golden opportunity for anthropology to apply its toolkit and figure out how indigenous cultures spread, change, and adapt over time. Willingly or not, the native population became the subject of fascination and research for a generation of new anthropologists and archaeologists.
Nuttall believed there was no one better qualified to lead the effort to set up a prestigious “centre of investigation” than Franz Boas. In a letter to Phoebe Hearst, dated May 19, 1901, Nuttall endorses her friend, saying, “I have the highest impression of Dr. Boas, who is high-minded, disinterested & devoted to the furtherance of scientific work.” What she wrote about Boas was a reflection of herself: she too was fired up to yank anthropology up out of its lazy treasure-hunting habits and slap some shape onto it. Nuttall wanted process, great minds, modern science, and in the end, big and satisfying results. As she explained to Dr. Boas, “You can count on me for doing all I can to further the cause of our beloved science.”14
NUTTALL NEVER FELL in love with a man, but she did fall in love with a house: Casa Alvarado. She had been planning to settle down in San Francisco, but upon meeting the handsome Mexican estate, soaked in historical charm, roses and sunlight, she dropped her plans, packed her bags, and moved to Mexico in November 1902.
The house had its own archaeological story.15 Coyoacán is located along the contour edges of a lava bed that comprises the Valley of Mexico, home to twelve thousand years of human history. In Nuttall’s backyard, remnants of ancient cultures could be found beneath orchard trees. One day Nuttall noticed children playing with small clay heads near her property. They looked so unusual that she paid the children for their toys and started looking for others. More pottery and ceramic figures surfaced, and there, in her very own garden, in collaboration with Gamio, she made the first study of Aztec pottery ever completed in a given site.16 The archaeological queen thus lived atop her own Aztec ruins. Did dreams of old metal knives, grinning idols, potsherds, and stone utensils drift up from the ancient soil and into her bedroom at night?
By all accounts Casa Alvarado was unforgettably grand, and D.H. Lawrence describes its shape and mood as follows:
The square, inner patio, dark, with sun lying on the heavy arches of one side, had pots of red and white flowers, but was ponderous, as if dead for centuries. A certain dead, heavy strength and beauty seemed there, unable to pass away, unable to liberate itself and decompose. There was a stone basin of clear but motionless water, and the heavy reddish-and-yellow arches went round the courtyard with warrior-like fatality; their bases in dark shadow. Dead, massive house of the Conquistadors, with a glimpse of tall-grown garden beyond, and further Aztec cypresses rising . . .17
The gardens were Nuttall’s second passion, after archaeology. Even when planting seeds she sought to revive history. She collected and planted seeds from ancient Mexican plants that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had never seen before. Over each season, she cultivated the food of Mexican ancestors and grew indigenous medicinal herbs. A tribute to Nuttall notes that “her intense love of flowers and the long hours she worked over them made her an authority on Mexican gardens . . . A visiting archaeologist would as often find her training her roses as at work at her desk. She would continue her work and keep up at the same time a delightful talk on the newest “finds” in archaeology.”18 Nuttall’s gardens were just one more way she connected to Mexican land, history, and culture.
Nuttall was also a tremendous host. Just about every archaeologist, traveler, artist, and person of note making their way through Mexico made a point of stopping in to see her. Some scholars were warmly encouraged to stay for extended periods of time. All were rewarded with stories from a woman who had her finger on the pulse of the city and its current politics, her mind wrapped around the country’s ghosts and buried past. They also got tea and cookies.
There is one story of Nuttall’s hosting aplomb, so curious, revealing, and persistent that it bears repeating. Two young male archaeologists stopped by the Casa Alvarado to pay their regards to Nuttall. Servants brought them into the house, and as they wandered the rooms, admiring the artifacts and furniture, Nuttall entered dressed elegantly in long skirts. She briskly walked across the hall to greet them, and as she walked her drawers inched southward until they slipped and fell down around her ankles. Without breaking her stride, she stepped straight out of them and shook the men’s hands as if nothing unusual had happened at all. Meanwhile, her maid ran in, grabbed the knickers, and darted off. True or not, the story has been cited in a reputable source, and it does seem to reveal some essence or truth of Nuttall’s personality: a lack of inhibition and an ability to glide through any misstep.19
Settled in Mexico, Nuttall became more involved in its archaeology than ever. She played a hand in setting up the International School of American Archaeology and Anthropology in Mexico City, and she was made Honorary Professor of Archaeology at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico. One of her more noteworthy discoveries was the Codex Zouche-Nuttall—folded screens made of animal skin or bark paper, covered with a thin coat of fine lime plaster and painted with bright colors in black outline—which she traced from the Monastery of San Marco in Florence, Italy, to the book’s owner, Lord Zouche, who lived in England. This codex has been heralded as the “best-known and most thoroughly understood pre-Conquest Mexican manuscript in existence today.”20 Nuttall demonstrated that the codices were not simple “picture books,” as had been assumed, but rather historical chronologies of great events. The scenes of marriage ceremonies, warriors, wild animals, childbirth, and sacrifice all told a lavish history of the land’s early inhabitants.
Nuttall also stumbled upon the Drake manuscripts, records from the voyage of Sir Francis Drake and crew aboard the Golden Hind in the late sixteenth century. Working in the archives on one of her numerous research projects, Nuttall describes finding the “volume which chance literally threw across my path . . . It lay on the floor in a dark and dusty corner from which I carried it to the light.”21 The sea captain Drake was her girlhood hero, and she pored over the manuscript pages that detailed the strenuous ordeals he and his crew suffered. They were imprisoned and, whi
le under watch, forced to give testimony about their motives for exploration. Nuttall was touched by the humanity of their voices and the intimacy of their words before their untimely deaths. She would “wonder that, after a lapse of centuries, their last utterances should have first reached me,” bringing her to “sometimes feel as though, in some strange way messages from those men, long dead, had been entrusted to me for transmission to their living compatriots.”22 Nuttall always walked a line that was tethered between Mexico’s past and present; history’s ghosts wisely chose her to communicate any overlooked facts and to set the record straight.
For all of her life, ancient books and manuscripts were Nuttall’s good friends. She could often be found in their company. Yet there came a day when the written clues and hidden histories she read pushed her out of the library, away from her desk, and into the field. She was fifty-three years old when it happened.
NUTTALL WROTE OF THE Island of Sacrificios, which is located off Veracruz: “a light house & 2 cocoanut palms are the sole landmarks on the islet which is but a half mile long.”23 It was a desolate strip of sand, covered with ruins and painted murals bleached by the sun. And it was bloody.
Like Amelia Edwards, who arrived in Cairo more by chance than design, Nuttall first explored the Island of Sacrificios because the steamer she was on for a pleasure trip had fallen victim to heavy northern winds. Stranded in Veracruz until the weather improved, she was pleased to plan an excursion to the island whose history she had read about for years. Nuttall and a small party of friends first set foot on the island on December 27, 1909; old potsherds were strewn on the beach like seashells. From an archaeological perspective, things looked very promising, and Nuttall returned two days later with a Mrs. Hamilton, a man named Señor Meneses, two engineers, and Mrs. Fortuño y Miramon. There were also two local men with the group, her indentured “peons,” there to assist in the digging.
Before the workmen had unloaded their equipment, Nuttall was off by herself scanning the shore for vestiges of the island’s past. She quickly detected a thick, imbedded layer of burnt lime, perhaps a place where it was originally manufactured. Carrying on, she spotted pieces of cement flooring and the base of a wall coated in plaster. She followed the base eastward until she was tracing a now-massive wall that ran east-west. Nuttall’s excitement grew, and as she followed the foundations of an obvious archaeological site, she knelt to the ground and began to tear away soil and roots from the buried surface of a smooth wall. With immense pleasure she noticed that lines painted in red ocher curved along the face of the ancient structure. She put the team to work clearing the area, saving one job for herself: “I reserved for myself the delicate task of clearing the surface of the wall, perceiving as I did so that the red lines formed a fragmentary conventional representation of the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl.”24
It was a great painted dragonish bird with a long history of Mesoamerican worship. Quetzalcoatl is tied to the island’s ritual importance and its role as a place of human sacrifice. Nuttall was eager to reconcile chronicles from centuries ago with archaeological remains, and the appearance of Quetzalcoatl that first day must have seemed a good sign. The accounts she had pulled from forgotten archives describe the scene seafarers witnessed upon arrival at the island before 1510, including buildings that may have related to Nuttall’s own unfolding discoveries:
We found thereon some very large buildings made of mortar and sand . . . There was another edifice made like a round tower, fifteen paces in diameter. On top of this there was a column like those of Castile, surmounted by an animal head resembling a lion, also made of marble. It had a hole in its head in which they [natives] put perfume, and its tongue was stretched out of its mouth. Near it there was a stone vase containing blood, which appeared to have been there for eight days. There were also two posts as high as a man, between which were stretched some cloths, embroidered in silk, which resembled the shawls worn by Moorish priests, and named ‘almaizares.’
On the other side there was an idol, with a feather in its head, whose face was upturned . . . Behind the stretched cloths were the bodies of two Indians . . . close to these bodies and the idol there were many skulls and bones.25
Perplexed, the ship’s captain inquired about what had taken place there. Why were the two men dead? Records report that the following answer was given: “. . . it was done as a kind of sacrifice . . . that the victims were beheaded on the wide stone; that the blood was poured into the vase and that the heart was taken out of the breast and burnt and offered to the said idol. The fleshy parts of the arms and legs were cut off and eaten. This was done to enemies with whom they were at war.”26
By 1572, the island had a reputation for being haunted by the “spirits of devils.” And by 1823, another sea captain, an Englishman, noted that the “island is strewn with the bones of British subjects who perished in this unhealthy climate . . .” The Island of Sacrificios always lived up to its name, a destination of sacrifice, and even Nuttall would conclude, “It is strange how, during the course of centuries, the history of the island seems always to have been tragic and associated with some form or other of human suffering and death.”27
In spite of the morbid past, Nuttall was excited about her project. She made plans to move into an “unattractive and uncomfortable” pair of rooms in an abandoned quarantine station on the island. For a woman in her early fifties, busy as a high-profile socialite, to forsake the comforts of a home she adored for life in the field, she must have been galvanized by the archaeological finds that could be hers. For here was material not bound in a book: it was real, and she could touch it and scrape away the sand to see what came up. Thrilled, she sent Boas a letter in 1910 outlining her plans for a “scientific mission.” She also appealed to government for financial support and was assured that it would be forthcoming. She would receive a stipend of $250 toward her expenses.
Nuttall was delighted about her stroke of good fortune. She made plans to spend “some weeks” on the island and looked forward to conducting a thorough exploration of the place, focusing especially on the mural she had uncovered and what appeared to be the temple described in sixteenth-century accounts.
ABOVE : Zelia Nuttall in her later years
As she made her travel arrangements, Nuttall was walloped by a series of blows. First, the government’s Minister of Public Instruction decided to reduce her funding to only $100. It was an impossible amount, completely insufficient to meet her very modest needs. Second, her plan to explore the whole island was now severely compromised: she was told that she would have to confine her investigations to a small portion of the island. And third, the most unbearable, was that Nuttall would now be supervised. Because she was (just) a woman, she would require the oversight of a man: Salvador Batres, the son of an old archrival, Investigator Leopoldo Batres. Batres was notorious for smuggling artifacts from sites he was supposed to be protecting and selling them to foreigners. He also bungled the National Museum’s entire classification system, deciding in his hubris that his predecessor’s work was somehow insufficient (though by Nuttall’s standards, it was quite good). Batres was widely regarded as an arrogant man and, in Nuttall’s opinion, a lousy archaeologist. When the two came into contact, animosity flared.
The announcement read: “ . . . he [Salvador Batres] should supervise her. This Office believes it to be indispensible that he should supervise everything relating to this exploration so that thus scientific interests of Mexico remain safeguarded . . .” Zelia must have choked with anger when she read this. Burning with indignation, Nuttall, the great expert on the island’s history, had been reduced to a mere field assistant, a “peon.” She wrote to Boas that “instead of being helped I was hindered in every way & that conditions offered me were impossible to be accepted by any self respecting archaeologist.”28 Nuttall was incensed, and she resigned from her position as Honorary Professor at the National Museum to show it.
She wiped her hands of the whole affair, but it wasn�
�t over yet. During Holy Week, Leopoldo Batres sneaked down to the island. A few weeks later the government newspaper published a formal notice that Batres had discovered the ruins on the Island of Sacrificios! Nuttall hit the roof. She quickly managed to have an article run in the Mexican Herald that drew harsh criticism of Batres’s cocky behavior; she made a fool of him. Referring to this intellectual theft as “the only discouraging experience I have had in a long scientific career”29 Nuttall began dishing out more shame to Batres, and she dished it out deep.
Her fingers alight with fury, Nuttall wrote a forty-two-page essay for the journal American Anthropologist, laying out her years of research, her expert knowledge of the island, her preliminary archaeological work, her theories, her field methods, and so on. The article is considered her most significant contribution to Mexican archaeology. Midway through, she breaks from her calm stream of methodical presentation of facts and finds to lambast Batres and his affiliates. She begins, “Knowing of the trying experiences that other archaeologists, foreign and Mexican, had undergone, I should have rigidly abstained, as heretofore, from having any dealings whatever with the Batres-Sierra coalition . . .”30