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Alice's papers became public in 1999 and included photographs, unpublished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.
Date
of release: March 16, 2009.
Size:
7x10 inches.
376
pages, 69 halftones, 3 maps.
Hardcover
ISBN 978-0-8263-4595-0
University
of New Mexico Press
Yucatán through her eyes. Alice Dixon Le Plongeon, writer and expeditionary photographer.