EXPLORER AND PHOTOGRAPHER ALICE DIXON ADDS THE MYSTIC INTO MAYA EXPLORATIONS

Alice Dixon LePlongeon

At 22 years old, Alice Dixon met Augustus Le Plongeon, a world explorer of antiquities, in London, in 1871. Le Plongeon, 26 years her senior, traveled to Europe after successful journeys to South America and California. His extensive explorations in Peru and Chile led him to London to study Mexican and Maya artifacts and manuscripts at the British Museum where they met. 

Considered an amateur archeologist, Dixon, a second generation photog- rapher, photographed ruins at Chichen Itza and Uxmal alongside her husband.

Alice Dixon's father, Henry, was a copper-plate printer who became a successful photographer and was recognized for his development of panchromatic photographic for his photos of London architecture. Alice learned the principles of photography from her father and worked as his assistant in his studio.

SPIRITUAL INFLUENCES

Another family member with a strong influence on Alice was her uncle, Dr. Jacob Dixon, who practiced spiritualism. Alice became involved in that movement at a young age, participating in seances at her uncle's home.

As for Le Plongeon, in Peru he studied earthquakes and explored the country's archeological sites, including Tinhuanaco which he photographed while trying to assimilate clues as to who the builders of that empire might have been. In combination with his own Peruvian explorations, he'd read the works of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, explorers of the Yucatan in the 1840s, and came to believe that civilization had early origins in the New World and he began to form philosophies on the world's great civilizations.

A few years into his South American sojourn, Le Plongeon heard of the California gold rush and jumped a ship to partake in that historic event, spending several years in gold country where he speculated on land and became a surveyor. There he managed to earn thirty thousand dollars in profits, enough to fund his trip to Europe as well as future South American travels. 

In Europe he stumbled onto a new photographic technique that used paper instead of metal and urged the inventor to teach him the process. This would serve him well when uncovering Yucatecan ruins, enabling he and Dixon to document their discoveries. Their photos of Uxmal and Chichen Itza remain some of the best ever taken as they show the pyramid sites as they stood for eons, long before archeologists re-discovered them.

HONEYMOON IN MEXICO

Soon after meeting, Alice and Le Plongeon were married. For their honey-moon they set sail for Cuba then onto Mexico, where they planned to explore ancient pyramid sites. They landed in Progreso, Yucatan, in 1873. 

A bout with yellow fever for Alice dampened their arrival but Le Plongeon nursed her back to health. During her recuperation the two studied Yucatecan Maya and became acquainted with local scholars. They believed communicating with present day Maya was an important step to interpreting the past. Alice remained a champion of the Maya her entire life, and wrote about them long after she left the Yucatan.

Alice in Palace of the Governors, Uxmal

Their first visit to see pyramids was at Uxmal, forty miles south of Merida. They were awed by the size of the site and camped in the Governor's Palace, sleeping on hammocks. They both took photos, cleared the land to better see the site and were determined to return again later.

Camping at Uxmal

CHICHEN ITZA

The number one item on the Le Plongeons' bucket list was Chichen Itza. He'd heard from a local that a sacred codex was buried there in a building with many chambers and he believed he could further his eccentric theory of Maya world supremacism if he could locate the text. Their timing overlapped the Caste War of Yucatan, and Piste, the pueblo nearby, was overrun with Chan Santa Cruz Indians. Le Plongeon, determined to search for the desired text, asked local authorities to post soldiers at the site as security.

He located the building, could not locate the text, but the building's lintel contained numerous glyphs which he believed could further his theory. He took 500 stereoscopic photos of the hieroglyphs, and he and Alice traced a number of murals and made molds of them in bas relief.

QUEEN MOO AND PRINCE CHACMOOL

They fixated on the Upper Temple of the Jaguars near the ball court. It was 1875. Workers discovered a large slab with carved figures holding outstretched arms. Le Plongeon called it Atlantis. Murals on the walls depicted village life, war scenes and rulers in court. The explorer concluded this was a generation of Maya rulers whose totem was an eagle or macaw. He declared it a symbol of a Maya princess who he christened Queen Moo (Maya for macaw). Her brother he named Prince ChacMool, powerful warrior, a reference to jaguar in Mayan. This flimsy attempt at a scholarly decision became the basis for his Maya myth as the center of world civilization and placed him squarely at odds with fellow archeologists of the time. His Maya "myth" led to much derision and plagued him his entire career.

The fabricated myth about a Maya princess and her warrior king brother who had been forced to flee Egypt, bringing their philosophies of the Maya with them, seduced the two at-one-time prominent Maya notables. They were viewed as the Maya world's "new age" scholars due to this far-fetched belief and the theory branded Le Plongeon as an eccentric crackpot, earning him disdain from those in his field. 

Excavation of ChacMool at Chichen Itza

Yet in spite of his oddball theories, Le Plongeon discovered the famous statue, ChacMool, five feet long weighing hundreds of pounds, which is virtually synonymous with Chichen Itza and the ancient Maya. Originally spelled Chaacmool, Maya for powerful warrior, the word was misspelled as ChacMool through a mis-translation by one of his missives to a benefactor. The ChacMool statue was lauded by the American Geographical Society as a great archeological find. The Le Plongeons struggled to bring the statue to the U.S. to display in Philadelphia at the America Centennial Exhibition but the president of Mexico denied their request. 

In the meantime, they sent other Maya artifacts to the U.S. to display at centennial ceremonies but the objects arrived too late. And in another spate of bad luck, the photos Le Plongeon had labored over were stolen by another archeologist who claimed them for his own. Soon even their main benefactor would give up on their excursions. At times they found it difficult to find money to eat, so dire was their situation. 

"SURROUNDED BY ENEMIES"

"Surrounded by enemies, Remington always at hand, death lurking in every direction," Alice wrote in a letter to a friend in 1877, describing their predicament. The Mexico government had refused to pay them for the extensive work they'd completed in not only raising the incredible ChacMool artifact but in delivering it to the pueblo Piste. With this final blow, they picked up and moved on to other ruins—Mayapan and sites in Honduras.

Their travels continued and in 1884 the Le Plongeons left Mexico and settled in New York. There Alice focused on her writing, both fact and fiction. She became well known for a series of articles written for the New York Times and other publications in which she romanticized the Maya world. Her best known work was Queen Moo's Talisman. Both she and her husband lectured non-stop in Europe and the U.S. promoting the Yucatan pyramids and the Maya. 

Queen Moo's Talisman

In A Dream of Maya, by Larry Desmond and Phyllis Messenger, Desmond explains if history had been kinder to the Le Plongeons, it would have depicted an extraordinary couple whose lifelong work had not been fairly appraised. The book gives deep insight into their lives and their controversial views and document their hard-nosed earnestness and early pioneering excavations—from digging up pyramid sites to drawing architectural floor plans and tracing murals to keeping detailed photographic records.

A Dream of Maya by Desmond and Messenger 

Their extensive explorations were done under the duress of the Caste War, yet they persisted and came away with great discoveries. 

Augustus Le Plongeon died in New York in 1908. Alice died in New York in 1910.

If you enjoyed this post, check out  Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

MEXICO'S FIRST WOMAN ARCHEOLOGIST— ISABEL RAMIREZ CASTENADA

Isabel Ramirez Castenada

Isabel Ramirez Castenada was the first Mexican woman to work as an archeologist and anthropologist in Mexico. Born in 1879 in Milpa Alta, a pueblo not far from Mexico City, she studied to be a primary school teacher and worked in pre-school for a number of years.

In 1906 she received a scholarship and was part of the first generation of Mexicans to study archeology, history and ethnology at the National Museum of Mexico, (Museo Nacional de Antropologia) the only institution offering these courses at the time. In 1907 and 1908 she worked for Eduard Seler and later Leopoldo Batres in the National Museum collections, classifying and cataloguing over 10,000 artifacts. She worked as an assistant and also taught archeology till 1911 when she joined the International School of American Archeology and Ethnology. The school, established to conduct research, also trained Mexican archeologists and ethnologists. Isabel secured a scholarship from the Mexican government and Columbia University to attend, as well as paid leave from the National Museum.

Around this time she accompanied Eduard Seler and his wife Caecilie Seler-Sachs on archeological expeditions to Palenque and the Yucatan Peninsula. She conducted fieldwork and did surveying while studying the site. She also participated in various ethnological field trips to the surrounding area of Mexico City and carried out the systemic collection of ceramics in the Toltec and Nahua city of Culhuacan.

Isabel at Palenque, 1911 (Archives)

Proficient in languages, she wrote and spoke Nahual, though it's not known if this was her mother tongue or if she learned it as part of her studies at the National Museum. Being bi-lingual enabled her to carry out important ethnographic work in her village, Milpa Alta, as well as other indigenous Nahua villages near Mexico City. Her primary ethnographic work consisted of compiling indigenous stories and myths which she later transcribed and translated into Spanish. These folktales, titled Ten Folktales in Modern Nahautl, were published in 1924 by Franz Boas, a mentor to Isabel who became known as the father of modern anthropology. 

The titles she translated were The Old Man of Teutli and the Rabbit, The Squirrel and the Prairie Dog, and The Fox and the Coyote. They read like Aesop's fables, usually with a moral at the end.

When the Mexican Revolution began, the International School closed down and the director left the country. Isabel was designated to secure the collections and transfer them to the National Museum. After the Revolution she remained in the museum's folklore section and became its head in 1918. Unfortunately the position lasted just one year due to lack of funding. She would not return for 20 years.  

Little is known about her during those years but on returning in 1936, she joined the education department, devising courses on archeology for teachers. Following this she continued to work for the museum in low-paying positions, mostly from her home due to poor eyesight.

Like other women in the field of archeology before the Revolution, Isabel had to fight for her place at the table, pushing boundaries to make room for her to work or study in the male-dominated emerging field.

Unlike other women who made up the Mexican archeological field, Isabel was born, raised and educated in Mexico which gave her a leg up, even though her family did not come from wealth. She had no affluent patrons supporting her work but despite challenges, she did valuable work, and became well known for compiling and analyzing indigenous knowledge and stories from Nahua communities.

Isabel Ramirez Castenada, 1908

She authored three papers of original research on the pre-colonial carved stones from the archeological and ethnographic collections at the National Museum and presented her research at the Tlalnepantla Parish church. These were on the folklore of Milpa Alta, traditional medicine, and superstition in the markets of Zumpango.

For decades her contributions in the development of archeology and anthropology were overshadowed due to criticism from male colleagues, especially Manuel Gamio. Though the discourse for the falling-out between Gamio and Ramirez is not clear, it appears it was based on a famous excavation in 1912 at a brickyard near Atzcapotzalco. Gamio, working for Boas as was Ramirez, originally outlined a document outlining the work and Ramirez followed up and elaborated on it. As the excavations continued to be carried out, dissertations were produced but apparently Gamio felt they were poorly published with mis-spellings that he blamed on Ramirez. At the same time, another excavation took place and a substantial collection of ceramics was found by Ramirez. Ramirez's accounts of both excavations were written up and as her find had been larger than that of Gamio, her accounts influenced the sequence that formed the basis of the Valley of Mexico chronology for years to come. Though never stated, Gamio may have felt slighted and retaliated by trying to discredit her achievements.

Shortly afterwards, while her group studied indigenous stories, they discovered that strong Spanish influences appeared in the phonetics. A common goal emerged to collect as much folklore and phonetic info as possible in order to compare both Spanish and Indian sources. Fellows threw themselves enthusiastically into the research and with Ramirez's understanding of Nahuatl, she became an integral part of the project, making contributions to the folklore from her native Milpa Alta. These investigations were one of the first attempts by anthropologists to deal with the problem of acculturation and its impact on New World cultures, a theme that would dominate the field in the 1930s. 

Even with her 20-year absence mid-career, Ramirez's star shines brightly as the first recognized woman archeologist in Mexico.

If you enjoyed this post, check out  Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon. And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.