Le Plongeon, Alice
Article
August 20, 2022
Alice Le Plongeon (born Alice Le Plongeon, née Dixon, December 12, 1851, London - June 8, 1910, Brooklyn, New York) was an American photographer, writer and amateur archaeologist of British origin. Born into a London artistic family, her father and brother were both artistic photographers and painters. At the age of 19, she married the photographer and traveler Auguste Le Plongeon, accompanied him on long journeys through Mexico and British Honduras, which lasted in 1873-1884. She assisted in the excavations and photo fixation of the archaeological sites of Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Mayapan, the islands of the east coast of Yucatan. She actively promoted the occult and pseudoscientific theories of her husband, and developed them herself in her own writings. In 1890, she spoke to the head of the Theosophical Society, Helena Blavatsky, with a lecture on discoveries in the Mayan country, but did not find a common language with her. In the 1980s, the anthropologist Laurence Gustave Desmond, who in 2009 published a separate biography of Alice and published her field diaries for the years 1873-1876, as well as several versions of the catalog of photographs taken by the Le Plongeon spouses, took care of the photographic archive of the Le Plongeons.