THE OTHER SIDE OF CHICHEN ITZA—WAS IT THE FIRST CANCUN?

 

Chichen Itza

Is Chichen Itza one of the Maya’s most revered and renowned pyramid sites or a glorified shrine-museum concocted by slick politicians to reap tourist dollars, like Cancun? It’s no secret that the Mexico National Tourist Corporation (MNTC) designed Cancun with the intention of creating a luxury destination that would pull in coveted currency to fill state and government coffers—and if some spilled over into the private sector, so much the better.

BIRTH OF CANCUN

In 1967 the Mexico government’s aim was to find the best locale for an international tourist resort with the finest beaches, the most beautiful water, and the fewest hurricanes. Another requirement would be proximity to its wealthy northern neighbor, the US, so flight times would be minimal. 

A strip of sand before MNTC's discovery

A strip of unpopulated sand at the northeast tip of the Yucatán Peninsula fit the bill—Cancun—a destination so easily accessible that at 9 a.m. one could be in New York and by noon, landing at Cancun International, moments away from a white sand beach and a pitcher of margaritas.

And with that very same intent, as early as the 1920s, long before Cancun was even a glimmer in MNTC’s eye, the Mexico government, along with help from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, was priming Chichen Itza to become Mexico’s first full-fledged tourist destination.

Fullbright scholar and former Assistant Professor of Anthopology at University of Washington, Quetzil Castañeda detailed this in his book, In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichen Itza. Through prolific research, Castaneda's book explains how it all came about. 

 
TOURIST DESTINATION

Chichen Itza, translated as mouth at the well of the Itzas, had been a tourist destination for over five hundred years when MNTC and the Carnegie Institution hatched their plan. After being twice abandoned by both the Itzas (750 AD) and the Maya (1194 AD) the site became a pilgrimage spot for religious groups in the 1500s because of its sacred cenote. A tourist Mecca for centuries, Chichen Itza was a place the Maya came to pay homage to their gods.

Chichen Itza drawing by Frederick Catherwood

Early explorers Edward H. Thompson and John Lloyd Stephens, artist Frederick Catherwood, along with others fueled the flames of discovery and from their explorations, the Yucatec and Hispanic elite, according to Castaneda, began to create a Maya myth or identity—distinctly different from that of either Spain or Mexico.  

CITY OF FABLES

In the 1920s, the Mexico government organized excavations under its agency Monumento Prehispanicos, and permitted the Carnegie Institution of Washington, headed in the Yucatán by explorer Sylvanus Morley, to conduct ‘multi-disciplinary’ research in the Yucatán and to excavate and restore what Castaneda calls ‘a city of fables.’

In his book, Castañeda insists the main goal of the Carnegie Institution's Excavations Department was to create a tourist Mecca rather than to restore the site to its original state.

Castañeda believes not only do economic interests (from local to international levels) now compete at the site but different government agencies and levels of state jurisdictions also compete for the slice of Chichen Itza’s tourist pie. 

Castañeda’s book maintains that the Maya civilization, although very real, has been ‘tweaked’ by competing government agencies to make the ‘reproduction’ of the archeological excavations more desirable to tourists.

In his book he calls Chichen Itza a museum exhibit which represents the Maya through the epochs. The exhibit implies the Maya came from ‘a primitive society or race’ and then rose to a high stature through the creation of the pyramids. 

But Castañeda argues that the Maya are examined through ‘the eyes of European civilization,’ by which all civilizations are compared and judged. 

In many ways, Castañeda’s views are similar to those of author Daniel Quinn in his controversial book, Ishmael, which divides the world into two camps:  the takers—modern Western civilization—and the givers indigenous cultures.  

Quinn’s premise is that  Western man usurps indigenous cultures and these ethnic societies and their “myths” are then lost forever, so that the takers can impose their myth—science—onto the entire world. 

Quinn equates this with the destruction of all indigenous societies. Castañeda’s book basically concurs with this premise, and in his lament for the Maya, calls what the state and government have done at Chichen Itza a “violation” against Mayan society, and goes so far as to call it on par with rape.

EQUINOX PHENOMENON

Castañeda theorizes the height of the deception takes place every vernal and autumnal equinox (roughly March 20, September 21) since 1974—when Mexico figured out these date were significant to the Maya. 

According to Castañeda, specific knowledge of the phenomenon dates back to when Morley was excavating the site in 1928, but it was ignored by archeologists, local Maya, and Yucatecans until a thesis was published in Mexico City in 1974 by researcher Luis El Arochi.

El Arochi, after years of study, noted that at 3 p.m. on these dates, sunlight bathed the main stairway of the pyramid K’ukul'kan (feathered serpent), creating a serpent-like shadow which crept down the pyramid’s massive stairs. El Arochi called this the “symbolic descent of K’ukul’kan,” and believed it related to Maya agricultural rituals. 

Once word was out about the equinox display of light and shadow, Chichen Itza’s K’ukul’kan pyramid became a tourist magnet. Tourist numbers jumped thirty percent that year. A star was born.

In 1921, Yucatan Governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto signed an agreement with Carnegie Institution that gave Sylvanus Morley a renewable ten year permit to conduct scientific study at the ancient Maya city. Among the site projects, studies would be conducted in geology, botany, zoology, climatology agronomy, medicine, physical anthropology, linguistics, history, archeology, ethnography and sociology.

Felipe Carrillo Puerto

Through these studies the Maya way of life could be dissected. Castañeda insists this allowed the structure of an evolutionary fable that created “a museum of history” at Chichen Itza.   

 
"With Maya labor from nearby towns, the jungle was peeled back to reveal the ancient stones of decayed buildings. Chichen Itza was restored as a replica of itself and reconstructed into a life size model of an ancient Maya city.

Y TU, FELIPE

Casteñada even goes so far as to state that Felipe Carrillo Puerto, progressive governor of the Yucatan, permitted Morley and the Carnegie Institution to conduct research to create a class consciousness amongs the Maya and forge an ethnic group identity onto them, essential to complete the social revolution for which he was striving. 

In the Yucatán, however the plan would serve another purpose as well. It would bolster a long stagnant economy based on the former reign of henequen—an all purpose fiber used for making rope and Panama hats—omething yet unseen—tourist dollars.

This contradictory view of Chichen Itza only heightens the mystery of the Maya. For a culture whose entire past was wiped out in an afternoon bonfire conducted by a fanatical priest in 1539, it makes one wonder anew—who were the Maya?

Chichen Itza Observatory. Photo Unsplash.

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.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT'S LONG-STANDING LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE MAYA

 

Ennis House in Los Angeles, Photo Trip Savvy.

Though it's believed Frank Lloyd Wright never stepped foot on the Yucatán Peninsula, when he arrived in Chicago in1893 to begin his career in architecture, lore has it the display of Maya artifacts and replicas at Chicago’s World's Pre-Columbian Exposition inspired him.

It was there he glimpsed plaster castings from Maya sites Chichen Itza and Uxmal. A feature of the lesser known Labna site, in southern Yucatán’s Pu'uc Region, eventually became important to his work because of his recurring use of its meaningful arch.

Labna Arch. Photo courtesy of Barbra Bishop.

But Wright's interest in the Maya had developed long before the Chicago exposition. He was drawn to it from childhood when his mother showed him pictures in books about Central America and Mexico. “These images stayed in his mind most of his life,” said Thomas Hines, UCLA architectural historian.

In the 1840s, two books about Central America archeology had become U.S. best sellers: Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, and Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, Part 2, by explorer John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood. These books drew Wright, as a youth, into the Maya world.

MAYAN REVIVAL STYLE

The 1893 exposition's display of the ancient Americas lauded the indigenous people who first called North America home. For the exposition, Wright and his employer, Louis Sullivan, contributed a monumental golden doorway for the Transportation Building and during Wright’s visits to check on it, he would have seen plaster casts of the Maya buildings. Both he and Sullivan were drawn to the style which came to be known as Mayan Revival.

Early on in his career Wright experimented with different styles, incorporating one or more into his commissions. By 1900, he had developed a style that became his signature, the Prairie Style. Considered to be the world’s greatest architect of all time, Wright had never attended a formal architectural school.

He designed over 1000 structures created in harmony with humanity and the environment during a career that spanned 70 years. He dubbed his philosophy organic architecture. His early beginnings were in the midwest where he was born and raised.

Eventually Wright broke with his employer and established his own firm in a Chicago suburb where he designed numerous commissions, gaining ground and notoriety with his well-heeled clients. By now he had married. With his wife, Catherine, and their six children, he settled into a white picket fence existence.

While designing a house for local residents Edwin and Mamah (Mamey) Cheney, Wright and Catherine began socializing at the precise moment that middle age, ennui regarding his Prairie Style designs, and a craving for change and greener pastures collided. Mamey, a feminist and free thinker, could keep up with Wright intellectually. She intrigued him and change won. She and her husband divorced, allowing Mamey to escape the marriage. 

The new couple left for Europe to avoid the tabloids and the brouhaha.

They traveled to Germany and Italy, viewing various architectural styles. On their return to the States, despite his wife refusing to grant a divorce, Wright was determined to build Mamey a house in rural Wisconsin near his childhood home. It would be transformational and a beauty and he would name it Taliesin.

Love and happiness, however, were short lived. In 1914 at a nearly completed Taliesin, Mamey was murdered by a household staff member along with her two children and five others. After the heinous massacre, Wright sought solace far from the midwest. Los Angeles, known as a place for reinvention and recuperation, beckoned. He headed west.

A PLACE FOR REINVENTION AND REJUVENATION

After the murders, he was again exposed to Maya influence at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. As the displays at Chicago had stimulated Wright, now known as FLW, this new glimpse of Maya culture made another lasting impression.

Even though they were based on a Maya fantasy world, the displays cemented the Maya link between architecture and death, "Which was not only the setting for a fantastic pyramid palace but also for human sacrifice; part of the complexes displayed where humans were buried,” said UCLA’s Hines.

"A place where the living could remember the dead.” 

And after the loss of his lover, death was much on the architect's mind. 

The exceptional style of the Maya sites must have greatly intrigued him. 

“It was an outsized influence on his Los Angeles architectural style," continued the UCLA historian.  

LOS ANGELES FIVE

Before his exodus to LA, Wright tested his Mayan Revival style on a 1915 Wisconsin commission, the A.D. German Warehouse. On completion, it more resembled a temple pulled from a Catherwood drawing of the Maya Nunnery at Uxmal than a warehouse. This commission used his Maya motif and became the basis for his residential work in LA. After Wisconsin he accepted an offer to design the Imperial Hotel in Japan.

Today five iconic LA houses render his Maya look. While constructing the first, Hollyhock House, he worked simultaneously on Japan’s Imperial Hotel which helped shape his architectural vision.

Though the houses Wright designed in Los Angeles pre-dated the 1920s Art Deco movement, they have the undeniable air of deco. We'll never know if Wright influenced the movement or vice versa.

Hollyhock House.

In a PBS special titled That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles, Christopher Hawthorne, writer/director as well as Architecture Critic for the LA Times, examines Wright’s intent for his iconic designs in that city.

FLW completed his first LA commission in 1921, Hollyhock House, located on 36 acres in Hollywood, for oil heiress Aline Barnsdall. Wright's finished design was basically a Maya temple. Barnsdall had planned on a multi-arts center, and never intended it for residential use.

With 17 rooms and seven baths, it's considered a bridge between Wright's two prominent styles—Mayan Revival, with textile blocks inspired by Palenque temples, and Prairie Style, with its low-pitched roof line.

In 1927 Barnsdall gifted it to the city. But it was at Hollyhock House, named for the flower that Barnsdall most loved, where Wright began working with natural materials.

A cultural nationalist, according to leading Wright authority and author Kathryn Smith, UCLA, he strove to define an original American architecture, shying away from Victorian and Spanish colonial. He believed an indigenous architectural style would better suit the Americas rather than a European style

His concept layout led to massive rooms and enormously high ceilings in some cases creating the feeling of a mausoleum, as those who lived in the houses had said. 

Next came the commission La Miniatura on an acre in Pasadena for the Millards. This is where he refined the concrete molecular block system with his stamped Maya patterns. Flat roofed and mysterious, one historian called it a small temple in a eucalyptus grove. It gives the feel of being at a jungle pyramid site, much like Palenque.

The Millard House.

After the Millard commission came the Storer House in 1923. Built on a steep hillside, the house is dominated by a large upstairs living room with a high ceiling. Maya inspired columns and tall narrow windows dominate. Considered one of Wright’s most thoughtful biographers, author Brendan Gill said it was more like a home for a Mayan god.

Los Angeles’ best known FLW house is the Ennis House, built also in 1923, for Charles and Mabel Ennis, and appears to be another Maya grand palace. Notably seen in a handful of movies including Blade Runner and Day of the Locust, it looms over the neighborhood like an ancient ruin, visible for miles around.

Last of the FLW LA five is the 1924 Freeman House built for dancer Harriet Freeman and her husband. Donated to USC in 1986, this house had the happiest existence. It was home for 62 years to the bohemian couple who befriended Wright and scraped together money for the commission. 

According to Harriet, the house was dense and introverted but it well-suited their purposes. Along with being their home, she used it as a dance center where she entertained and performed. 

The daughter and son-in-law of USC's Dean of Architecture lived in the house while attending university in 2002 for a year. "It felt like a ruin," she said. "Crumbling down all around us." 

Eric Wright, the architect's grandson who lived at FLW's unfinished Malibu hills property until his death in 2023 was interviewed by Chris Hawthorne for That Far Corner documentary. 

When asked what drew FLW to LA, Wright was candid. "He was very upset abut the loss of Mamey and the adverse publicity because they weren't married," he said.

"What was his state of mind when he moved to Los Angeles?"

"Sorrow," Wright said. "He had a wonderful life until her death."

NOT JUST HEAVY BUT HEAVY-HEARTED

Hawthorne asked Tim Samuelson, Chicago's cultural historian, what he made of Wright's Mayan Revival look. "They seem mausoleum-like. They are heavy. One critic described them as dark and macabre—like the dramas of Sophocles. The LA homes were ... brutal, romantic, fantastic, and—strange." 

Filmmaker Hawthorne continues, "The LA houses have funereal aspects. But scholars hesitate to embrace the idea of pre-Columbia death cults. These ideas, however, shaped his understanding of pre-Columbian design and its meaning.

"His LA houses stand apart from his overall world and other LA architecture of the period. They're not just heavy, but heavy-hearted—and in some cases, they are in a state of ruin. I don't think it's because the houses look crypt-like and that's why they are empty. They're empty because they are crypt-like. None are used as full time residences. The houses are shadowed by violence and even death.

"Building these houses was a means to put a troubled period behind him. It exemplified his own uncertain state of mind. They served as a catalyst for him.

"Wright buried Mamey in the Unity Chapel Cemetery in Spring Green, Wisconsin—but she's also buried in Los Angeles." 

Who knew Wright's ongoing obsession with the Maya would rescue him as he worked his way or of grief by creating mausoleum-like pyramid tombs over and over again in reverence of the women he loved and lost.

"His architecture," said Wright historian and architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, Blair Kamin, "and this mission helped him recover from personal tragedy. His architecture saved him in the end."

The Nunnery at Uxmal Pyramids.

           A special thanks to Barbra Bishop for use of Labna Arch photo.

ARCHEOLOGISTS AND SCHOLARS ASSIST IN CURBING LOOTING OF MAYA ANTIQUITIES

 

Chichen Itza

“Tombs are robbed, temples are looted, all to feed the international market for antiquities.” Donna Yates, Archeologist and Lecturer in Antiquities Theft and Art Crime, The Netherlands.

In 1997 we drove across Mexico in our Ford Focus wagon, loaded to the nines with our belongings and cat, heading towards a new life on the Mexican Caribbean coast. Our hearts quickened after passing Escarcega. At the end of that lonely 200-mile stretch of road, we'd cross from the state of Campeche into Quintana Roo. Then we'd be homeward bound.

As we left Escarcega in the rearview mirror, the road narrowed and we settled in for the long drive ahead. We decided we’d take a break halfway when we got to some little known pyramids, have a sandwich, and let Max, then just a kitten, walk around.

I'd read about this quartet of pyramids—Kohunlich, Becan, Chicanna, and Xpuyil—near the ceremonial center Calakmul. Though these sites didn't have the star power of Chichen Itza or Tulum, Kohunlich, known for its Temple of the Masks, had gained fame in 1971 when looters tried to sell one of its huge stucco masks to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
We saw no other cars on the road and around 4 p.m. we passed Chicanna. Soon after, I spotted the tower of Xpuyil. "Want to stop?" I asked Paul.

He nodded and we drove down a deserted sascab lane through an open chainlink gate into an empty parking lot. I pulled myself from the car while Paul saw to Max. I stretched, went to the car’s back end to find the cooler and brought out pre-made tuna sandwiches. I called to Paul.

He'd put Max back inside the car. We leaned against the door, ready for our snack. After eating I wanted to have a quick look around the site. Just as I bit into my lunch, a white, older model International pulling a sizable tarp-covered trailer drove into the parking lot, leaving dust in its wake. Two men sat inside; an older man was driving.

The vehicle was 300 feet away when the guy riding shotgun jumped out. He was young and lanky and moved quickly across the lot. The truck had Canadian plates and the driver kept the engine idling.

"Weird. Why'd just one guy get out and why didn’t the driver turn off the engine?"

"It is weird," Paul said. We both watched the younger man dart through an opening in the fence and run along the path that led to the site.
With the truck still idling, we viewed the scene warily. "I don't feel good about this."

"Me neither. What are they doing?”

Paul started pushing things into the way-back. I followed his lead and closed the cooler, holding my sandwich in one hand as I tossed things into the car.

"Let's get out of here. Something’s not right. Are they scouting for artifacts? Why the trailer?”

"Not good,” Paul agreed. “And that tarp? Max is inside. Let's go."

The International had parked at just the right angle so we couldn't see the driver, as though that outcome was planned. If these guys were grave looters, we didn't want to be around when INAH (National Institute of Anthropology and History) discovered them, or worse, the federales. Stealing artifacts is a serious crime.

Paul started the car and headed down the narrow driveway that led to the highway. The International was still idling when I turned around to give it one last look.

"Grave looters?"

"We don't want to know," Paul said as he eased onto the uneven asphalt, revved the engine and we headed towards Chetumal.

IS ANTQUITY THEFT THE WORLD'S SECOND OLDEST PROFESSION?

Antiquity looters come in many guises—unassuming tourist types, locals, businessmen looking to make a buck, collectors.

Art theft is big business. It’s a ‘trade’ worth billions. Ask any dealer of antiquities. And as the international appetite for Maya culture grows so does the hunger for illegal artifacts.

As long as there's poverty in undeveloped countries where ancient civilizations once stood, you can bank on it. Some art dealers call it the world's second oldest profession. 

“Any country in civil war or conflict is ripe for antiquities looting,” says Tess Davis, legal expert and archeologist from Boston University. When conflict erupts in an archeological rich country, the world art market is suddenly flooded with antiquities from that country. Looting becomes a means of subsistence when homelands are war-torn.

THE RISE OF NARCOTICS TRAFFICKING

"This is not just a white collar crime. Insurgents, terrorists, are using the antiquities trade to fund their efforts. Unless we get it together soon, I fear there will be nothing left," Davis said in a lecture titled "Tomb Raiders and Terrorist Financing," for Boston University alumnae.

Most organized trafficking groups dealing drugs and other commodities are business savvy these days and have diversified portfolios. As with real estate, logging and iron ore, the prices antiquities command are too high for them to ignore.

Compared with well known ancient civilizations in Europe and Western Asia, archeological interest in Maya culture came relatively late, partially due to the forbidding nature of the jungles. The outside world was first exposed to Maya pyramids through the writings and drawings of explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in the 1840s. Their memoirs about their early adventuring shone a light on the Maya. 

Soon other adventurers trekked through the Peninsula, conducting rudimentary recordings of archeological sites with limited removal of Maya artifacts. The first excavations were not conducted until the 20th century.

THE BEGINNINGS

Art and antiquity, according to Donna Yates in her thesis, "Displacement, Deforestation and Drugs: Antiquities Trafficking and Narcotics Economies of Guatemala," underwent a huge upheaval in the first half of the 20th century. Aestethic tastes in contemporary art shifted to modern looks and an interest was taken in tribal art. Ancient cultural objects originating from Africa, Asia, and the Americas bore a distinctly different look from classic Western models. 

They didn't conform to familiar Greek and Roman styles and demand grew as connections from them were drawn to famous artists of the day such as Picasso, Kahlo and Rivera. Soon, powerful collectors began to source them from their countries of origin.

At the time, 1957, Nelson Rockefeller founded the Museum of Primitive Art in New York. This was a watershed for the collection of Maya and other primitive cultural properties. The Maya were on the market.

THE MAYA PURGE

Endemic looting of nearly every known Maya site began around 1960, Yates’ thesis explains. Collectors and museums, inspired by Rockefeller, were looking to fill the Maya gap and demanded the best the Maya had to offer. 

Clemency Coggins, a professor of Archeology and Art History at Boston University, wrote decades ago,"In the last ten years there has been an incalculable increase in the number of monuments systematically stolen, mutilated, and illicitly exported from Guatemala and Mexico in order to feed the international art market. Not since the 16th century has Latin American been so ruthlessly plundered.”

RANSACKING RUINS

Coggins’ landmark paper is often credited with exposing the gravity of the situation. It characterizes the 1960s as a time when bands of looters moved freely through the region, particularly in the heavily jungled regions of Guatemala's Peten, mutilating large stone monuments with power tools. Countless Maya sites were looted before they were even located by archeologists. "It was a terrible time," she wrote.

Unfortunately this meant that large carved stone stelas that depicted the events of Maya rulers and their recorded histories along with large architectural treasures from Maya temples were plundered from where they stood.

In order to understand any individual site, it's imperative for archeologists to know the provenance of a stela or piece. Without dates and locations it's impossible to place the site, the structure, even the timeline of looted antiquities.

But looters cared not for the history of the Maya. They had one mission only: how to remove stela that could be 20 feet high, weighing several tons from inaccessible jungles. Taking a power saw to a stela and cutting it vertically removed the face of it. Often they would cut that into quarters to make for easier shipping. The pieces could be sold off separately. Sometimes the inscriptions along the sides were damaged by the mutilation.

This plundering set the archeology world back several decades in trying to break the Maya hieroglyphic code.

“The 1960s looting of the Peten is tied to two jungle economies: the trade in rare hardwoods and tapping gum trees for chicle. In both instances, men (usually) at the bottom of the supply chain moved through vast tracts of wilderness searching for different tree types. In doing so, they encountered poorly protected remote sites as well as Maya cities yet unknown to archeologists,” Coggins wrote.

CHICLEROS PLAY BOTH SIDES

Chicleros, as chicle hunters are known, are credited with locating many important sites in the Peten—including Xultun and even Calakmul, the famous Heritage site. Early in the 20th century, archeologists worked closely with these men, paying them for info about new sites and monuments. But when chicle prices bottomed in the 1970s, financial gains for looting and trafficking antiquities grew. Chicleros could expect higher rewards for reporting an unknown site to a trafficker than to an archeologist. And they could even be employed in the demolition, for added revenue.

Said Victor Segovia, archeologist, as he peered at the damage of a Xultun temple literally cut through the middle, “I believe four more heads lie beneath the rubble but I won’t remove them until I’m certain they’ll be protected. The humans are more poisonous than snakes,” he told reporters, there to view looting damage at the overgrown jungle site.

With antiquity looting in the news, museums world-wide are being forced to return archeological gems to the country of origin. It may be too little too late, but with applied pressure from the U.N. and worldwide cultural ministers, slow progress is being made. And now at long last, the cat’s finally out of the bag.     

Mask at Kohunlich. Photo Dan Griffin 

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.

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.