Zelia Nuttall and Drake's Dream

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1886 Zelia Nuttall began work at the Peabody Museum for Ethnology and Archaeology under the tutelage of Frederic Putnam. Nuttall became a specialist in precolumbian Mesoamerican cultures and conducted archaeological fieldwork in Mexico for the Peabody, where she was “Honorary Assistant in Mexican Archaeology,” an unpaid post that she held for 47 years. She lectured at major conferences and universities in the Americas and Europe and wrote articles for prestigious journals. She traveled throughout the world to collect archaeological and ethnological specimens for museum collections, as well as for a select group of wealthy patrons including Phoebe Hearst. With Hearst’s assistance, she was one of the founding members of the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, where in the early years of the department she was a field director of archaeological research in Mexico. Her major contributions to the field of anthropology are classics: *The Nuttall Codex, *The Island of Sacrificios, and the *Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations. Her findings on the location of Francis Drake’s fair bay on the West Coast were eclipsed by Drake’s Plate of Brass land claim, a hoax that was likely created by a famous history professor, her nemesis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 29862