Two recent books shed light on evolving interpretations of pre-Columbian civilizations. Zelia Nuttall, who died in 1933 at the age of 75, was a pioneering anthropologist whose many contributions ranged from decoding a giant Aztec calendar to burnishing the reputation of the sixteenth-century English navigator Sir Francis Drake. In this beautifully crafted biography, Grindle situates Nuttall’s work in Mexico in the lead-up to the 1910 revolution. Her research helped Mexicans understand their pre-Columbian national heritage, in its sophisticated engineering, gardening, artistry, and cosmology, as being as glorious as that of Mediterranean societies in the classical era. Nuttall came from a background of privilege and wealth in San Francisco, but she was also a divorced single mother who succeeded in a male-dominated professional world through assertiveness, dogged research, incessant travel, and prolific publication. She built vast networks among senior museum administrators and scholars, philanthropists, and politicians, including U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and Mexican President Porfirio Díaz. In her stately villa in Mexico City, she formidably presided over a European-style salon of elite gatherings. A product of her times, Nuttall preferred to uncover commonalities across ancient civilizations, whereas twenty-first-century cultural anthropology often celebrates diversity and difference.
Pauketat argues that climate change explains the rise and fall of many pre-Columbian civilizations. A medieval warm period, from about AD 800 to 1300, allowed complex civilizations to emerge in Central America, Mexico, and what is now the southwest and central United States, just as a subsequent cooling period contributed to their decline. These somewhat interconnected societies acknowledged the decisive forces of nature by worshiping the wind-and-rain-feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl. Drawing on an array of evidence, including the chronicles of Spanish conquistadors, recent anthropological and archaeological research, and his own extensive observations from the field, Pauketat finds striking similarities among these diverse societies, including in their architecture, cosmology, creation myths, ceramics, and use of psychotropic substances and therapeutic steam baths. The influence of Mesoamerica reached up the Mississippi River as far north as the urban complex of Cahokia (near modern-day St. Louis). Just as current research finds contacts throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, Pauketat speculates that long-distance travel for pilgrimage, migration, and cultural exchange yielded a more integrated precolonial Central America and North America than most scholars previously imagined.
