Le Plongeon, Alice Dixon
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1851-1910) UK photographer, traveler, amateur archaeologist and author who, with her husband Augustus Le Plongeon (1826-1908), spent from 1873 to 1885 in Mexico and South America, photographing still-extant ruins (over 2000 negatives, held in various archives, have survived); and suggesting on a Eurocentric diffusionist model that the pre-Columbian civilizations of America were copies of the civilization of Atlantis. Her interest in Theosophy inspired Queen Moo's Talisman: The Fall of the Mayan Empire (1902), which provides in detail a history of ancient Maya consistent with Theosophical understandings of Atlantis (see Prehistoric SF). The novel was dramatized in 1911 by Brooks Betts as «The Fall of Maya: A Tragic Drama of Ancient America»; this play remains unpublished. [JC]
Alice Dixon Le Plongeon
born London: 1851
died New York: 1910
works (selected)
- Queen Moo's Talisman: The Fall of the Mayan Empire (New York: P Eckler, 1902) [hb/]
links
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