Book description
Alice Dixon (1851-1910) was born into a comfortable middle class life
in London that she eagerly left behind to travel to Yucatán as the
young bride of Maya archaeologist Augustus Le Plongeon. Working side
by side as photographers and archaeologists, the Le Plongeons were the
first to excavate and systematically photograph the Maya sites of
Chichén Itzá and Uxmal. After spending eleven years in the field, she
devoted the rest of her life to lecturing and published books and
articles on a wide range of topics, including her exploration of Maya
civilization, political activism and social justice, and epic poetry.
Alice's papers became public in 1999 and included photographs,
unpublished manuscripts, correspondence, and a handwritten diary; over
two thousand of her prints and negatives survive today in public and
private collections. Combined with Lawrence Desmond's biography of
this remarkable woman's life, her diary offers readers a rare glimpse
of life in the Yucatán peninsula during the final quarter of the
nineteenth century, and an insider's view of fieldwork just prior to
the emergence of Mesoamerican archaeology as a professional discipline.
Lawrence Gustave Desmond is senior research fellow in archaeology
with the Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project at Harvard
University, and a research associate with the department of anthropology
at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. He is the coauthor
of
A Dream of Maya
, a look at the life and archaeology of the early Mayanist Augustus Le
Plongeon.
