1901. Nuttall's mother's Mexican ancestry cultivated her early interest in that country. On a visit there she studied some archaeological artifacts and later published a paper on the small terra-cotta heads found at Teotihuacan. The paper attracted attention in scholarly circles and won her an appointment as honorary special assistant in Mexican archaeology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum and, the next year, a fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. While she lived in Europe, Nuttall traveled extensively for study and to attend scholarly congresses. The results of her wide-ranging investigations were published in The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations, in which she traced cultural parallels between ancient Middle Eastern and American civilizations and hypothesized that culture may have been carried to the Western Hemisphere by Phoenician explorers.