From surveying to Maya fieldwork
Le Plongeon was born on Jersey in 1825 or 1826; sources differ on the year. His early career crossed several occupations and countries. He taught in Valparaíso, Chile, then joined the movement to California during the gold rush. Surveying work included a plan of Marysville in 1851. Photography became another livelihood, first through a portrait studio in San Francisco and later in Lima, where he arrived in 1862. In Peru he photographed ancient sites and investigated earthquakes as well as practising medicine.
Reading Brasseur de Bourbourg, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood helped direct his attention to the Maya. In London he met Alice Dixon, whose training in her father’s photographic studio would be central to their partnership. They travelled to Yucatán in 1873 and spent much of the following twelve years there. At Chichén Itzá and Uxmal they recorded buildings, inscriptions and sculpture, using wet-collodion glass negatives and stereoscopic photographs. Their work included excavating a chacmool figure and documenting the Platform of Venus with photographs and drawings.
The care of those records did not validate Le Plongeon’s interpretation of them. He argued that Maya civilisation preceded Egypt and supplied its founders, resisting the chronology accepted by other researchers. His increasingly combative exchanges with scholars contributed to his isolation. After returning to New York in 1885, the couple settled in Brooklyn and continued writing and lecturing. Augustus died there in 1908. Their surviving photographs remain useful records of structures and details subsequently damaged or lost.
