Zelia Maria Magdalena Nuttall (6 September 1857 – 12 April 1933) was an American archaeologist and anthropologist who specialised in pre-Aztec Mexican cultures and pre-Columbian manuscripts.

Frederic Ward Putnam, curator of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, named her special assistant in Mexican archaeology, an honorary post she held for forty-seven years.

[9][6] Frederic Putnam and German-American anthropologist Franz Boas saw her as an excellent mediator between Americanist circles in different countries because of her education and cosmopolitan relations.

In his 1886 annual report for the museum, Putnam praised Nuttall as "familiar with the Nahuatl language, having intimate and influential friends among the Mexicans, and with an exceptional talent for linguistics and archaeology.

Nuttall was unable to acquire the codex but hired an artist to make a careful copy which was published by the Peabody Museum in 1902.

Another important discovery was the Codex Magliabecchiano, which she published in 1903 under the title The Book of the Life of the Ancient Mexicans with an introduction, translation, and commentary.

Her claim of discovery was later disputed by a European scholar who reported his find somewhat earlier, but it was Nuttall who publicized the document and made it accessible to a broad audience.

She argued that seafaring Phoenicians sailed to the Americas and as a result of this influence, Meso-American civilizations had developed in parallel with those in Egypt and the Middle East.

Under Hearst's sponsorship, Nuttall joined a mission to Russia organized by the University of Pennsylvania to collect ethnographic materials for their museum.

In 1901 Hearst sponsored the establishment of an anthropology department and museum at the University of California, Berkeley, and invited Nuttall to serve on the organizing committee.

[2] In 1908, while doing research in the National Archives of Mexico, Nuttall came across a previously unknown manuscript relating to the voyage of Francis Drake's circumnavigation.

Following up on Nuttall’s work, historian E.G. R. Taylor of Birkbeck College, theorized that the vocabulary words Drake and his chaplain recorded could be of a Chinookan language.

After performing preliminary research on the island and obtaining funds from the Mexican government, Nuttall was pushed aside by Batres who appointed himself director of the project.

[15] Nuttall investigated Mexico's past to give recognition and pride to its present at a time where Western archaeology favoured salacious narratives of ancient Mesoamericans.

She hoped her work would "lead to a growing recognition of the bonds of universal brotherhood which unite the present inhabitants of this great and ancient continent to their not unworthy predecessors."

In addition, she visited the Pan-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition at Nizhny Novgorod, where she inspected numerous artifacts from regions as distant as Siberia, and collected more than 400 items from Russia, Finland, Poland, and Russian Turkestan.