In 1875, Augustus and Alice Le Plongeon travelled into the forests of Yucatán with 100 soldiers, a 200-pound box of photographic equipment and a plan to investigate the ancient Mayan city of Chichén Itzá.
Their fieldwork produced an extraordinary photographic record and the excavation of a remarkable sculpture now known as a Chacmool. It all started so well, but then they started making stuff up. Their interpretation produced Queen Móo, her murdered brother-husband Prince Coh, the lost land of Mu and a theory connecting the ancient Maya with Egypt, Greece, India and Freemasonry.
Louise tells Nat the story of two skilled photographers, two pioneering fieldworkers and two absolutely terrible historians.
DIRT BAGS is the comedy archaeology podcast uncovering the rivalries, disasters, stolen credit and extremely questionable methods behind some of archaeology’s biggest discoveries.
Sponsored by DigVentures.
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Lawrence G. Desmond and Phyllis M. Messenger, A Dream of Maya: Augustus and Alice Le Plongeon in Nineteenth-Century Yucatan, University of New Mexico Press, 1988:
https://archive.org/details/dreamofmayaaugus0000desm
Lawrence G. Desmond, Yucatán Through Her Eyes: Alice Dixon Le Plongeon, Writer and Expeditionary Photographer, University of New Mexico Press, 2009:
https://search.worldcat.org/title/276228932
Sean McDaniel, “The Lure of Móo,” Archaeology Magazine, January/February 2007:
https://archive.archaeology.org/0701/abstracts/plongeon.html
Augustus and Alice Dixon Le Plongeon Papers, Getty Research Institute:
https://www.getty.edu/research/collections/collection/113YAV
Augustus and Alice Dixon Le Plongeon Photographs, Online Archive of California:
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8kp859t/
Stephen Salisbury Jr., The Mayas, the Sources of Their History; Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries, 1877:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29723
Alice Dixon Le Plongeon, Queen Móo’s Talisman: The Fall of the Maya Empire, 1902:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47842
