Frans Blom

Who was Frans Blom?

Frans Blom was a Danish explorer and archaeologist.

Frans Blom was born in 1893 in Copenhagen, Denmark to a middle-class family of antique merchants. He was restless and started travelling, eventually reaching 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 ruins which he encountered where he was working. He started drawing and documenting these ruins. After he showed his work to the Mexican National Museum of Anthropology, it financed some of his expeditions. He met Sylvanus G. Morley, who brought him to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here he took a Masters degree in Archeology.

He taught at Tulane University in New Orleans and during his tenure, he undertook several expeditions to Mesoamerica. In 1923 his studies at Palenque documented a number of features neglected by earlier researchers. In 1924 Blom excavated the Maya archaeological site of Uaxactun in Guatemala. From his explorations around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, he wrote some of the first scholarly reports of a number of sites of the Olmec civilization.