Her quest was to excavate not the soil, but the record

With her book “In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall and the Search for Mexico’s Ancient Civilizations,” Merilee Grindle acquaints readers with the first anthropologist to fully decipher the Aztec calendar stone. The stone, which was uncovered in 1790 in Mexico City, was a gateway to understanding Aztec rituals. The dogged research into the calendar and other artifacts by Zelia Nuttall (1857-1933) was critical to the understanding of early Mesoamerican history and culture. Nuttall was self-taught in what was then a new field