It is probably fair to say that Chichén Itzá is one of the most frequently photographed archaeological sites in the world.  However, few of the people who snap pictures of it today know that the very first photographs of the site represented an amazingly innovative application of new technology.  Augustus Le Plongeon learned the technique of creating photographic negatives directly from Fox Talbot, one of the fathers of modern photography.  He applied it to the documentation of Maya sites in the Yucatán, where he augmented the technique by shooting many of his photographs in stereo pairs.  These were viewed using a device called a stereoscope, which simulated the effect of three-dimensional vision.

Below you will find links to blue/red 3D images based on photographic stereo pairs created by Augustus Le Plongeon in the late 19th century.  For more information about Le Plongeon and how the original photographs were taken, please refer to the book A Dream of Maya: Augustus and Alice Le Plongeon in Nineteenth-Century Yucatan, by Lawrence Desmond and Phyllis Messenger (University of New Mexico Press, 1988).

To see these photographs as three-dimensional images, you must be wearing a pair of 3D glasses of the type used for 3D movies, comic books, and other novelties.  One eye must be covered by a red filter, the other by a blue filter.  You can easily make your own 3D glasses with pieces of transparent red and blue plastic, such as are often used by copy shops for report covers.  These materials can be obtained at most art supplies stores.  Obviously, you must also be able to view these images on a color monitor that displays at least 256 colors.  The effect may vary with the use of different color palettes.  I cannot guarantee that you will be able to successfully recreate it on your own monitor.

Please bear in mind that these are experimental images reproduced from photographs of relatively low quality.  Much better images could be reproduced using modern photographic techniques.  I have created these images for the purpose of demonstrating how 3D stereo pairs might be reproduced on the World Wide Web.  I believe this technique could be especially useful for both printing and displaying images of relief sculpture.

Feel free to create links to this page, but please do not copy or reproduce these 3D images without my permission.

Enjoy!

John W. Hoopes
Dept. of Anthropology
University of Kansas
hoopes@ukans.edu

Las Monjas, Chichén Itzá ca. 1875, with Augustus Le Plongeon in foreground.
Las Monjas, Chichén Itzá ca. 1875, with Alice Le Plongeon in foreground.
La Iglesia, Chichén Itzá ca. 1875.
Akab Dzib, Chichén Itzá, ca. 1875.
Palace of the Governor, Uxmal, ca. 1877 (detail of facade).