She had the attention of every anthropologist and archaeologist in North America reading the popular journal, and she used it to devastating effect. Not only did she ruin Batres’s career, she humiliated the administration that had enabled him, noting with matter-of-fact coolness that it was no wonder this “coalition” had discouraged modern science and driven all true archaeological talent out of Mexico.
Just when the lynching seems complete, Nuttall sharpens her claws and rips into Batres again, this time criticizing his entire classification scheme for the museum’s archaeology department with a string of embarrassing examples. Señor Batres was destroyed, finished. In contrast, Nuttall’s reputation not only had been restored but was now brighter than ever. Everyone knew she was in the right. As a later obituary for her attested, “Mrs. Nuttall’s vivid mind, independent will, and a remarkable belief in the truth of her theories caused her life to be punctuated with controversies.” She was drawn to a good fight like a moth to light.
IN A DAY when there were hardly any women working in scientific fields, Zelia was regarded as “the very last of the great pioneers of Mexican archaeology.”31 She was one of the great pioneers to be sure, but most notably she was the only woman on a roster of men. She was prolific in her scholarly interests and pursued everything from the universalism of the swastika to archaic culture to ancient moon calendars. Over time some of her work has fallen into disuse—new material has proved old theories wrong, recent discoveries have revamped once trusty chronologies. Yet a large portion of her work is still relied upon today for its accuracy and erudition. It was Nuttall who decoded mysterious codices, who brought manuscripts to light, and who was able to unite disparate strands of research on Mexican artifacts and sites. Before she settled into life at Casa Alvarado she traveled extensively—collecting artifacts in Russia, navigating archives in Italian libraries—and even as a new bride, Nuttall lived the life of an anthropologist, debating questions of ethnology and ethics over breakfast.
ABOVE : The Codex Zouche-Nuttall, one of Zelia Nuttall’s most important discoveries
What drew Nuttall to archaeology is a question that can be whittled down to an even finer point: what drew her to Mexican archaeology? For all her interest in world history, Nuttall’s relationship with Mexico was deeply monogamous. Nuttall’s path toward archaeology was illuminated when her mother handed her the picture books, when she first met the serpent Quetzalcoatl as an eight-year-old.
All of Nuttall’s personal letters have been lost, and with them any personal expression of her passion for the field.32 But one has only to look at her life: marriage, separation—Mexico (as if to seek inspiration at a difficult time); Europe, motherhood, a return to California roots and then a refusal, a seduction—Mexico again. Nuttall stayed in her beloved Mexico and Casa Alvarado until the day she died, in 1933 at age seventy-five. Her love affair with the country was best expressed through archaeology. It allowed her to engage with the past, present, and future of the land and culture she adored. She dug into its soil and found pieces of its heritage, she nurtured her native plants from volcanic soils littered with prehistoric ceramics to watch them bloom each spring, and she published her research and recommendations broadly to help inform preservation of Mexico’s heritage for the future.
Nowhere is Nuttall’s love for Mexico, past and future, clearer than in her article titled The New Year of Tropical American Indigenes, written toward the end of her life, in 1928. Through it, Nuttall seeks to restore indigenous Mexican culture to its living heirs. Aware of what was lost when the Spanish tore through and conquered the country, Nuttall was an early advocate for the revival of “Indian” traditions. She calls upon the poetics of the solar cult to breathe history’s legacy into contemporary life with a traditional celebration of the indigenous New Year. She begins by explaining how in a region 20 degrees north and south of the Equator, “a curious solar phenomenon takes place on different days, according to the latitude, and at different intervals. In its annual circuit the sun reaches the zenith of each latitude twice a year, near noontime, and when this happens no shadows are cast by either people or things.”33
This was the “beneficial descent” of the sun god to the earth. Nuttall goes on to detail how once “picturesque ceremonies” were held where “offerings consisting of gorgeous gifts made of precious stones, gold, silver, and other valuable minerals . . .” were laid at the foot of temples bathed in complete and shadowless sun twice a year. This ancient tradition was lost when the Spanish demanded eradication of the solar cult and ordered the sacred temples destroyed.
Nuttall hopes to restore this ritual of light and renewal to the people of Mexico. She voices her desire to see that “the children and young people not only of Mexico but of the other Hispano-American countries as well, bring back to life, as a school festival, the observance of the new year of their ancestors, placing in the grounds and gardens of their schools more or less simple gnomons, orienting the circles and lines of old.” In Nuttall’s opinion “it would be a charming as well as a patriotic and highly educational festival, the revival of such an ancient, such a typical, and such a purely Indian custom.”34
Nuttall did not romanticize the past—her work at the Island of Sacrificios alone and its evidence of brutal human sacrifice would have made any attempt to present earlier days as idyllic seem silly. Her greatest strength as a researcher was in finding what the facts were. What the documents in lost archives revealed. What the strange language of codices hid within their stream of symbols and pictures. She was a scholar anchored more to modern science and method than to speculation or fancy.
For this reason, Nuttall’s call to resurrect indigenous solar celebrations is sincere. She does not want to gaze at quaint Mexican culture from an ex-pat’s balcony; rather, she summons the culture’s own legacy. Nutall gave her heart to Mexico. And one gets the feeling that Mexico’s ghosts were happy to have her there, fondly watching as she brushed away history’s dust and dirt.
ABOVE : The extraordinary Gertude Bell, age fifty-three, 1921
1868 –1926
GERT RUDEBELL
O, Desert Tiger!
“She is only a woman, but Y’Allah she is a mighty and valiant one . . . If the women of the English are like her, the men must “ be like lions in strength and valor.” 1 Such were the words of Bedouin sheik Fahad Bey, whom Gertrude Lowthian Bell encountered on her journey across the Arabian Desert in the winter of 1914. He may have wondered if all British women were like her, but the answer is certain: no other woman was.
A creature unto herself, Bell was an adventurer, intellect, archaeologist, photographer, author, diplomat and political strategist, poet, mountain climber, and ethnographer who deftly made her way through Bedouin camps, royal homes, and crowded Middle Eastern bazaars alone, save for the local men she hired as guides and muleteers. The most powerful and respected woman of the British Empire, Bell was a comrade of T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), adviser to Winston Churchill, the founder of what later became the Iraq National Museum, and author of the country’s first antiquity preservation laws. Her life was a steady sequence of mighty accomplishments, her style ferociously smart.
Dubbed “Mesopotamia’s Uncrowned Queen,” “the Shaper of Nations,” and “Daughter of the Desert,” Bell inspires sweeping admiration. It’s the Bell Spell. A tall and willowy redhead, galloping on horseback through the desert wearing a long fur coat, saddlebags bulging with money, photography equipment, books, and silk dressing gowns, she was legendary, and her life was the stuff of an epic tale. It was built of bravery, cleverness, love, and fight and punctuated by tremendous joys and tragedy. She was a headstrong woman “avid,” her mother recounted, “of experience.”
When her horse couldn’t make it because the terrain was too treacherous, when her guides declined to hike to the top of a hill to find some rumored ruins because the incline was too steep, the intrepid Bell was off her saddle and trudging up that hillside on her own, dodging the thistle
and baking under a blazing sun. In nearly everything she did, she exercised a clear determination to reach her goals despite the obstacles in front of her. Her physical and mental abilities were in synch: she was both famed mountain climber and honored Oxford scholar. With a body as agile as her brilliant mind, Bell was unstoppable.
But she was human too, imperfect and flawed, an impressive and indefatigable workaholic. On occasion she exhausted herself. Her work’s legacy has fostered criticism and fueled foes. Her role in facilitating British colonialism comes under heat from scholars today, and she’ll never escape her position as honorary secretary of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League in Britain.
Bell had a real taste for poetry both written and lived. Fluent in Arabic, Persian, French, German, and several other languages, she was a deep admirer of the Sufi poet Hafiz, and her early translation of his work is still considered one of the finest. Based on her books, letters, and diaries, we also find that Bell was a poet herself. As her stepmother remarked, “the spirit of poetry coloured all her prose descriptions, all the pictures that she herself saw and succeeded in making others see.”2 Her writing crackles with brilliance and wit, smolders with insight, both social and political. For such an accomplished woman there is also heartfelt emotion, at times vulnerability, in her writing. Take her description of a moonless night when she “scrambled over the heaps of ruin” and “. . .caught the eye of a great star that had climbed up above the broken line of the arcade, and we agreed together that it was better to journey over earth and sky than to sit upon a column all your days.”3
Bell dreamed of travel and she journeyed far in a day when travel was arduous, maps were few, danger was daily, and the comforts of her English home were utterly absent. In agreement with the heavens, she lived daringly and uncompromisingly. And away from the routines of her affluent estate and family she took great pleasure when entertained by desert gossip, sitting at camp fireside, outside canvas tents, listening with rapt attention to stories of camel-lifting, blood feuds, and shifting tribal alliances.
As a scholar, Bell permitted her interest in archaeology—in visiting and recording the ruins, inscriptions, and mounds of the open deserts—to structure her incredible journeys. Her travels were frequently directed from one archaeological site to the next, each ancient building a touchstone of earthy purpose in her loftier pursuits of knowledge. Without her love of archaeology, Bell’s explorations would have lacked a framework, almost as if she were traveling without destination. As she once noted, “The path of archaeology led me to the sheikh’s door . . .”4 Indeed, it was what led her everywhere.
GERTRUDE BELL WAS born to an upper-class family in England, the sixth-richest in the country, and the homes she lived in over the years were posh. Her father was Sir Hugh Bell, a well-to-do ironmaster and grandson to the powerful Isaac Lowthian Bell, one of the county’s foremost and wealthiest industrialists. He was a mogul in the world of science and innovation. It was her grandfather’s wealth that had made the Bell family rich, though her father carried on his own successful career.
The Bell family lived in a seaside house called Red Barns in the village of Redcar, near the town of Middlesbrough in North Yorkshire. This area was like an affluent suburb, conveniently close to, but far enough away from, the nearby industrial center of Middlesbrough, with its manufacture of iron and sooty skies. The family also owned a home in Belgrave in London, an upper-class neighborhood where political leaders and intellectuals of the day would get together in a regular ferment. The third home was Rounton Grange, also in Yorkshire, Bell’s favorite. Built by her grandfather in the Arts and Crafts style, this house was where she did most of her writing.
Bell and her siblings grew up surrounded by lush English gardens, and each child always had his or her own little plot to tend. Bell’s awareness of their seasonal production was keen. Notes she wrote as a little girl count off which types of flowers she found that day, how many, and where. The gardens of her youth gave Bell an eye for green, and in the deserts she later explored she would find and identify whatever had managed to photosynthesize. When she traveled, her letters home were flowery. Not in the sentimental sense, but in the botanical: fields carpeted by sheets of red anemones, breezes pungent with the fragrance of fig blossoms and Lebanon cedar. Her field notes bloom with wild almond and apricot trees, hills where “pale blue hyacinths lifted their clustered bells above the tufa blocks, irises and red anemones and a yellow hawkseed dotted the grass,”5 and ruins where olive trees grew and vines rambled. Throughout her life, she took pleasure in spring wildflowers regardless of where she was. From picking countryside cowslips as a teenager with her sister Molly— “it is so heavenly here with all the things coming out and the grass growing long”—to decades later when she was sunburned, riding on horseback, and carrying a rifle to protect herself against desert soldiers, Bell always doted on a wilderness that “had blossomed like the rose.” She catalogued plants as if they were all dear friends. “There was the yellow daisy, the sweet-scented mauve wild stock, a great splendid sort of dark purple onion, the white garlic and purple mallow, and higher up a tiny blue iris and red anemones and a dawning pink thing like a linum. . .”6
This love of botany was a connective element in Bell’s life that joined two vastly different environments: Victorian England and the Middle East. Whether in a desert tent or canopy bed, the flowers she collected and kept by her bedside might well have been one of the most consistently and conventionally “feminine” things about her.
Her family consisted of her stepmother, Florence; her father, Hugh Bell; and their five children: Gertrude, Maurice (both stepchildren to Florence), Molly, Elsa, and Hugh, in descending order of age. They were close-knit, and what stands out most in the lifetime of letters Bell wrote home to them is an unshakeable familial affection. She never fails to express deep interest in every family event, from the selection of satin ribbons for party dresses to the marriages of her friends and sisters. Her letters home over a lifetime read like fast heartbeats in their constant excitement. In her early travels, they are filled with an enthusiasm for life that spills off the pages—as if every place and each new conversation were one of a kind, irreplaceable, almost too good to be true. Over and over again, she stuffed fast-written rapture into envelopes. Her letters would reach out to her family with open arms, in a rush of words: To see you again would delight me so! I’d fall upon your neck. Old-speak for a hug.
Bell was only four years old when her mother, Maria Shield, a delicate lady, died three weeks after giving birth to Bell’s brother Maurice, in 1871. As a result of that loss, she developed a powerfully close relationship with her father, Sir Hugh Bell, which made them a bonded pair for life. From childhood through her adult years, Bell relied on her father for advice, opinion, support, and affection. At university, she would cite his opinions as authoritative, ending any of her heated arguments with a declaration of what Sir Hugh Bell thought on the matter. When she was a little girl, the two of them would stroll the countryside, ride horses, and chat by the fireplace. In later years, and as Bell’s work became more complicated and more famous, and as the stakes grew ever higher, they corresponded regularly and she consulted him on matters political, financial, diplomatic, and strategic.
Sir Hugh visited his daughter abroad several times, and when she was without him, she missed him more than anyone. She reflected that “it is at times a very odd sensation to be out in the world quite by myself . . . I don’t think I ever feel lonely, though the one person I often wish for is Papa.”7 Since Bell never married, the closeness she felt to her father only intensified over the years, never lessened or distracted by the attentions of a spouse.
After the death of his first wife, Maria, Bell’s father married Florence Ollife, a sophisticated and well-connected twenty-four-year-old from Paris who had a strong influence on Bell’s upbringing. She shaped her stepdaughter’s manners—softening a natural impatience—her style of dress, and even her work ethic. Florence wrote books of
nursery rhymes and songs, plays, articles, and even an opera, and she devoted tireless effort to chronicling the lives of England’s poor. Like Bell, Florence was industrious, intellectual, worldly. Yet unlike her mold-breaking stepdaughter, Florence was a more typical fit with her times. Women could conduct charity work for the common good of society, but that was extracurricular to family and home life. It was with real reluctance that she permitted her stepdaughter an education that exceeded piano lessons, homemaking, and hostessing. In her view, and in most peoples’ then, too much education could be harmful to a young woman. Doctors even warned that too much thinking during a girl’s teenage years could harm her reproductive abilities and her brain. Not to mention that too much skill in debate and world affairs might deter a suitor.
Still, Florence did some interesting and daring work herself. She interviewed destitute families and documented their experiences, using a kind of ethnographic approach to glean insights into hardships faced by England’s poor. From this work came a massive book called At the Works: A Study of a Manufacturing Town. The conclusions she drew did little to remedy the situation or the cause of the problem—gut-wrenching poverty and a brutal class system—but the plight of lower-class families was described in sympathetic detail. By her work, she helped bridge understanding between one class and another and, more than anything else, stirred up some empathy. When her stepdaughter later crossed deserts and befriended the people that lived therein, she would employ a similar approach: sitting down with strangers to listen and learn.
As a young girl, Bell was powerfully smart. Feisty, hotly opinionated, boastful, and confident, Bell was always in pursuit of a verbal wrangling and a chance to broaden her own thinking. She devoured books. She demanded attention from the housemaids, loved to argue her point of view, and wanted to learn what people knew but was less inclined to feign interest in what they thought. Her interest in the common girlish lessons of sewing, music, and singing was minimal at best, but she was wickedly skilled at a riding a pony. She played sports, tortured her brother with dares, and threw her dog in the lake just . . . because.
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