Frans Blom was a Danish

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

 explorer and archaeologist.

Frans Blom was born in 1893 in Copenhagen

Copenhagen

Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...

, Denmark to a middle-class family of antique merchants. He was restless and started travelling eventually arriving in Mexico in 1919 where he found work in the oil industry as a paymaster. Travelling to remote locations in the Mexican jungle he became interested in the Maya

Maya civilization

The Maya is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as for its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems. Initially established during the Pre-Classic period The Maya is a Mesoamerican...

 ruins that he encountered where he was working. He started drawing and documenting these ruins. He was contracted by the Mexican National Museum of Anthropology which financed some of his expeditions. He met Sylvanus G. Morley who brought him to Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in Boston

Boston

Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

 and here he took a Masters degree in Archeology. He was employed at Tulane University

Tulane University

Tulane University is a private, nonsectarian research university located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States...

 in New Orleans and during his tenure here he undertook several expeditions to Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...

. In 1923 his studies at Palenque

Palenque

Palenque was a Maya city state in southern Mexico that flourished in the 7th century. The Palenque ruins date back to 100 BC to its fall around 800 AD...

 documented a number of features neglected by earlier researchers. In 1924 Blom discovered the Maya archaeological site

Archaeological site

An archaeological site is a place in which evidence of past activity is preserved , and which has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology and represents a part of the archaeological record.Beyond this, the definition and geographical extent of a 'site' can vary widely,...

 of Uaxactun

Uaxactun

Uaxactun is an ancient ruin of the Maya civilization, located in the Petén Basin region of the Maya lowlands, in the present-day department of Petén, Guatemala. The site lies some north of the major center of Tikal...

 in Guatemala

Guatemala

Guatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast...

. His explorations in around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec

Isthmus of Tehuantepec

The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is an isthmus in Mexico. It represents the shortest distance between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, and prior to the opening of the Panama Canal was a major shipping route known simply as the Tehuantepec Route...

 gave the first scholarly reports of a number of sites of the Olmec

Olmec

The Olmec were the first major Pre-Columbian civilization in Mexico. They lived in the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico, in the modern-day states of Veracruz and Tabasco....

 civilization. In 1926 he was made head of Tulane's newly established Department of Middle American Research.

In 1932 he was married to the American Mary Thomas, but six years later they were divorced and Blom acquired an alcohol habit which later forced him to retire from the university. Blom moved to Mexico where he met the Swiss photographer Gertrude “Trudi” Duby (1901-1993) whom he married.

In 1950, the Bloms bought a large house in San Cristóbal de las Casas. This house was dubbed Casa Na Bolom

Casa Na Bolom

Casa Na Bolom was the home of archeologist Frans Blom and his wife, Gertrude Duby Blom, the documentary photographer, journalist, environmental pioneer, and jungle adverturer...

- na meaning "house" in the Lacandon

Lacandon

The Lacandon are one of the Maya peoples who live in the jungles of the Mexican state of Chiapas, near the southern border with Guatemala. Their homeland, the Lacandon Jungle, lies along the Mexican side of the Usumacinta River and its tributaries. The Lacandon are one of the most isolated and...

 Maya language, and bolom (or b'alum in some Mayan languages

Mayan languages

The Mayan languages form a language family spoken in Mesoamerica and northern Central America. Mayan languages are spoken by at least 6 million indigenous Maya, primarily in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras...

) means "jaguar

Jaguar

The jaguar is a big cat, a feline in the Panthera genus, and is the only Panthera species found in the Americas. The jaguar is the third-largest feline after the tiger and the lion, and the largest in the Western Hemisphere. The jaguar's present range extends from Southern United States and Mexico...

", and is also a pun on Blom's name (since "Bolom" or similar varitions was still a fairly common Maya family name, some of the Maya assumed it to be Blom's name.) The Bloms turned the house into a cultural and scientific center with rooms for visitors, with Gertrude continuing the enterprise for decades after Frans’s death. The house today functions as a museum.

The Bloms continued undertaking expeditions for the Mexican government. Blom died in 1963, at age 70.

Books by Blom

• I de store Skove : Breve fra Meksiko (1923)
• Tribes and Temples (1926-1927)
• Conquest of Yucatan (1936)
• La selva Lacandona (1955), med Gertrude Duby

External links

• Asociacion Cultural Na Bolom - website of the Na Bolom cultural center
• Chiapas amber - Frans Blom
• Documentary Photographs of Gertrude Blom

Over a hundred images of Uxmal from the 1930 Blom-Tulane expedition. http://academic.reed.edu/uxmal/galleries/thumbnails/drawings/Drawings-Leyrer-Blom.htm