In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl - Merilee Grindle

A New Yorker Best Book of the YearA Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year“Grindle’s passionate book, including extensive research in Mexico, will ensure that [Zelia Nuttall] is never forgotten.” —British Museum Magazine“[A] beautifully crafted biography.” —Foreign Affairs“What a woman! And what a fabulous life to unearth. Zelia Nuttall was incredibly smart, determined, a divorced single mother in a man’s world, a great scholar, and an original thinker—yet today she’s completely forgotten. Merilee Grindle has dug deep into the archives and uncovered her fascinating story.” —Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of NatureThe question of human origins took on a new urgency in the nineteenth century, as scholars began to look beyond the Bible to understand how different cultures and civilizations emerged. Zelia Nuttall was among the most accomplished of these scholars. A child of the San Francisco Gold Rush, Nuttall also had roots in Mexico City, where her mother was born. As a young woman, she threw herself into the study of Aztec customs and cosmology, eager to use the emerging sciences of archaeology and anthropology to prove that modern Mexico was built over the ruins of ancients. Proud, prickly, and independent, Nuttall made the first accurate decoding of the Aztec calendar stone. She found pre-Columbian texts lost in European archives and made sense of their pictographic histories. Her
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