Frans Blom

Frans Blom (Frants Ferdinand Blom; August 9, 1893, Copenhagen – June 23, 1963, San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico) 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 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 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 in Boston and here he took a Masters degree in Archeology. He was employed at Tulane University in New Orleans and during his tenure here he undertook several expeditions to Mesoamerica. In 1923 his studies at Palenque documented a number of features neglected by earlier researchers. In 1924 Blom discovered the Maya archaeological site of Uaxactun in Guatemala. His explorations in around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec gave the first scholarly reports of a number of sites of the Olmec 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 - na meaning "house" in the Lacandon Maya language, and bolom (or b'alum in some Mayan languages) means "jaguar", 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.