Amanda Adams (10 page)

In a letter dated September
21
,
1896
, Nuttall writes to Hearst from Morocco, describing herself in no uncertain terms as a “scientist.” In addition, there is mention of her work in Russia, Egypt, and Switzerland. Yet a rare moment surfaces in her correspondence with Phoebe when she admits that “my undertaking was not an easy one—I felt the responsibility heavily at times and it was a great trial to be alone & so far removed from all counsel or help.”
⁸
In spite of the hardship Nuttall faced (and, it seems, the loneliness), she played a critical role in amassing the thousands of ethnographic objects of the Hearst collection.
⁹
And if the task was not easy, she accomplished it admirably nonetheless.

It was also around this time that Nuttall became acquainted with Franz Boas, one of the most important figures in the history of anthropology. The two became friends at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
¹⁰
The fair opened on May 1, and Chicago’s Midway was a kaleidoscope of outlandish exhibits, flashy architecture, food of every culinary persuasion (from pumpkin pie to escargot), and everything spectacular and strange, including the very first Ferris wheel. A 22,000-pound block of Canadian cheese vied for attention with an Egyptian cigarette booth. There were aquariums filled with exotic fish, giant California redwoods on display, a fountain of red wine, and a medieval knight sculpture made entirely of prunes. Sideshows and carnies called out to the crowds, and belly dancers shocked passersby with a risque “hootchy-kootchy” routine. Tambourines rang, train whistles clamored, volcano dioramas exploded and spat orange lava, and reconstructed “native villages” showcased cultures from around the globe. There was even a Moorish palace with funhouse mirrors and wax statues that was a sensation. New technological inventions like electricity were demonstrated to the crowd’s excited
ooohs
and
ahhhhs,
and a walk through the Horticultural Building provided an explosion of color, a happy assault on the senses, a verdant paradise of flowers, and simulated environments that ranged from Mexican deserts to Japanese tea gardens.
¹¹
Amid all this chaos and showmanship, Nuttall and Boas were huddled in “Department M,” a section of the fair devoted to archaeology, physical anthropology (bones), ethnology, and history.

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, while 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.