Nicholson, H. B. (Henry B.)

Henry Bigger Nicholson (September 5, 1925-March 2, 2007) was Professor and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, dedicated to studying Aztec history, art and religion. Nicholson participated in WWII in Germany and Philippines (1944-1945), studied at UC Berkeley and received his PhD in 1958 from Harvard. He started his professional career in 1956 at UCLA. He researched the ethnohistory of the Mesoamerican area co-tradition, conducted field archaeological projects and published over 200 articles and monographs. Nicholson helped excavate Cerro Portezuelo in 1957, near the ancient shores of Lake Texcoco in Central Mexico (A.D. 350-1500, now Mexico City). The Cerro Portezuelo Archives at UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History is a result of these excavations that were initially started by George Brainerd (1909-1956). This collection's ceramic objects represent the most complete and unbroken sequence for the region. The National Science Foundation provided funds to analyze the excavated materials in 1961 and funded several more projects conducted by Nicholson to catalogue Central Mexico's cultural history. Over the course of his career, Nicholson visited archeological sites, museums and private collections in Mexico, the United States and Europe compiling photographs of Aztec art and sculpture and bibliographic records for the UCLA Aztec Archive, a computerized image storage and retrieval system for the Late Post-classic Central Mexican art and sculpture. He was an associate editor for parts 3 and 4 of the Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources, vols. 14 and 15 of the Handbook of middle American Indians (1975), and was a co-editor of The work of Bernardino de Sahagún with Quiñones Keber (1988). The Handbook was a collaborative project, sponsored in part by the Library of Congress. Nicholson also helped catalogue other collections around the country and published several codices and reports on Aztec culture.