Zelia Nuttall

Zelia Nuttall (1857–1933) was an American archaeologist and historian of ancient Mexico. Born in San Francisco to an Irish father and a Mexican mother, she first worked on terracotta heads from Teotihuacan in 1886 and was soon appointed honorary assistant in Mexican archaeology at Harvard's Peabody Museum, a post she held for life. She rediscovered two pre-Columbian pictorial manuscripts in European libraries, one of which, the Codex Nuttall, bears her name, and published The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations (1901). From 1905 she lived in the Casa Alvarado at Coyoacán near Mexico City, where she excavated, entertained scholars and campaigned to revive the Aztec new year festival.