Yucatán through Her Eyes

Pioneering archaeologists have often made mistakes as great as their contributions. Yucatán through Her Eyes offers the case in point of Alice Dixon Le Plongeon (b. 1851), who worked side by side with her more famous husband Augustus as they carried out archaeological and photographic explorations of places such as Chichén Itzá and Uxmal. The book sandwiches her diary of adventures in Yucatán (1873–76) between more conventional biographies of her earlier and later years. Alice was the youngest daughter of a London photographer. Desperate for a life of adventure and authorship, she realized her dreams by marrying an eccentric gold miner turned archaeologist 20 years her senior. But it was a meeting of hearts as well as minds, and the Le Plongeons shared an affectionate marriage as they endured hardships unimaginable to most scholars today. In 1884 they relocated to New York City, where they spent the next two decades promoting fanciful theories about Maya peoples. Alice died of breast cancer in 1910, only two years after her husband’s own demise and a few months before Mexico went up in the smoke of revolution.This book by Lawrence Desmond succeeds in three areas. First, we get enough information on early archaeology to fill a mid-sized temple, and we gain a painfully clear notion of how difficult it was to carry out early excavations. The workers, tired of low pay and the Le Plongeons’ iron rations, often ran away or worked in low gear. In those days the question of who owns antiquities had yet to be resolved, and the Le Plongeons fell into a bitter quarrel with the nationalist Mexican government about rights to the reclining chacmool statue that they discovered. (Incidentally, it was the Le Plongeons who gave this iconic figure its name, still used today, after the Maya name for a type of jaguar.) To top things off, the couple had to live on snakes and wild turkeys that they managed to kill.Alice’s diary tells us much about the culture and folkways of nineteenth-century Yucatán. She paints vivid scenes of popular religion and neocolonial relations between Hispanics and Mayas. I appreciated her descriptions of sacatan drum dances, the rebels of Chan Santa Cruz, and the 1876 revolution of Teodocio Canto. Finally, and perhaps most surprising, Yucatán through Her Eyes provides a vivid account of the travails of yesteryear’s explorer-photographers. True to the training she received in her father’s shop, she worked with fragile wet collodion plates that had to be developed in the field. The cameras lacked shutters, and Augustus, who handled most of the picture taking, simply uncapped the camera lens for the time necessary. Chemicals often ran out or had to be iced down to functional temperatures. (It is worth mentioning that Le Plongeon learned the trade from no less than photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot.) The photographs included here are in a class by themselves as documents of 1870s Yucatán. Add to these contributions Alice’s lively voice and gift for pithy Victorian phrases, and you have a narrative considerably more interesting than the writings of the better-known Augustus.If Alice Dixon Le Plongeon had so much to say, why are we only reading about her now? Desmond attributes Alice’s obscurity to her bottomless faith in and crusader’s dedication to her husband’s crackpot ideas. Augustus Le Plongeon went to his grave convinced that the Mayas of Yucatán represented a mother culture that had somehow brought knowledge and civilization to Egypt. He was also convinced of his own ability to read the Maya “alphabet” (even though little glyph writing survives at northern Early Postclassic sites such as Chichén Itzá, in large part because the invention of paper reduced the demand for more durable stone inscriptions). Even among the scientific community of his own day, this viewpoint soon became untenable, but neither husband nor wife ever considered that they might have been wrong. They also dealt heavily in spiritualism, reincarnation, dream revelations, and the lost continents of Mu and Atlantis. Alice found nothing inappropriate in publishing verse novels that celebrated Augustus’s bizarre theories. It was this Madame Le Plongeon that late nineteenth-century scholars knew and understandably chose to forget.Lawrence Desmond has made heroic attempts to synthesize the vast collection of Le Plongeon materials housed at the J. Paul Getty Museum. He ignores most recent scholarship on Yucatán, studies that would have provided a far deeper context to Alice’s observations. In some places the text remains underdeveloped. Material on Alice as early feminist and critic of social inequalities, for example, is less rich, perhaps because these concerns came late to her, and perhaps because they always remained secondary to the promotion of Maya diffusionist theories. Still, her voice and determination carries this book through to its conclusion. Bravery, wit, and careful observation inform every page. Maybe Alice Dixon Le Plongeon’s insistence that spirits communicate with the living was right after all

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