| Sumario: | This article analyzes the photographs, essays, and travel diary of the English explorer Alice Dixon Le Plongeon on her stay in the Yucatán Peninsula during the second half of the nineteenth century (1874–1885). Despite her pioneering work as an explorer and photographer of Chichén Itzá and Uxmal, Dixon has not been part of the group of foreign travelers—men and women— who compose the multicultural, multilingual canon of Latin America. My study rescues Dixon’s work, paying particular attention to the materials (furniture, clothing, household, photographic instruments) that built her experience and knowledge as an archaeologist and photographer in the Yucatán. An analysis of the presence, circulation, and reflection on objects (“things” under Bill Brown’s definition) contributes to the study of the complex relationship between travelers’ own identities and the territories they visited, highlights the role of material culture in the definition of “the feminine” in the nineteenth century, and proposes new ways to approach the construction of scientific and ethnographic knowledge in women’s travelogues.
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