![]() ![]() While her knowledge of photography interested Le Plongeon, his knowledge of ancient cultures interested Alice. Alice was her father’s assistant in his London studio and knew everything there was to know about photography. Alice, who was 25 years younger than Le Plongeon, was the daughter of famous British photographer Henry Dixon, who is known for his pioneering work in advanced photographic methods, including the panchromatic technique. In 1871 while Augustus Le Plongeon was in London to study ancient Mesoamerican manuscripts at the British Museum, he met Alice Dixon. The story of the lost continent of Mu and its connection to ancient Mexico begins with a love affair. The blank slate afforded to the various theorists, amateur antiquarians and low-grade religious leaders of the 19 th Century gave them a wonderful world to explore and an empty vessel to fill with whatever suited their whims and agendas. Modern-day archaeologists would say that the connection between, say, upstate New York and the world of the ancient Maya would be extremely tenuous or utterly nonexistent. As early as the 1820s Americans had theories connecting ancient Mexico to the ancient civilizations of the Old World and through proximity, the United States itself thus had a glorious ancient past. Many Americans at the time had a historical inferiority complex of sorts as a young nation they wanted so desperately to be on par with the Old World and to have a sense of connection to a meaningful ancient past. Since the early part of the 19 th Century, Americans had looked south to those ruins and speculated about the history of their own part of North America. Archaeology as a science was in its infancy and there were many theories – ranging from the well-thought-out to the bizarre – to explain the magnificent, extensive, and mostly unexcavated ruins found in the Mexican jungles. ![]() Le Plongeon had somewhat of a blank slate to work with. ![]() He raised the required money and arrived in the Yucatán with his new wife Alice in the summer of 1873. Le Plongeon was to employ the latest technology to previously unexplored ruins of Mexico, specifically the Maya area, including new photography techniques and plaster casting. Abbot de Bourbourg had theories connecting the Old World to the New via Plato’s lost continent of Atlantis and even suggested that the ancient civilizations in Mexico pre-date those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The title of the lecture was “Vestiges of Antiquity: On the Coincidences between the Monuments of Ancient America and Those of Assyria and Egypt.” Le Plongeon, who had 8 years’ experience in Peru studying ancient monuments there, wanted to expand his study to Mexico and build on the work of Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, a French abbot who spent many years in Mexico as a missionary and studied its ancient past. In a lecture before the American Geographical Society in January of 1873, a bearded French-American by the name of Augustus Le Plongeon outlined his plans for an expedition to the Yucatán. ![]()
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