ARTICLE Ornithologists in Olman: Epistemological Ecologies in the Field and the Museum ROBERT J. KETT Abstract This article examines scientific activities surrounding a series of excavations of Olmec archaeological sites in the 1930s and 1940s. These excavations were the first to concertedly explore areas of Tabasco and Veracruz, Mexico that would come to be called Olman. These sites were the locus of various collecting activities including the unearthing of monuments and systematic studies of stratigraphies and ceramic sequences, as well as the gathering of ornithological specimens from an underexplored region. Through publications in National Geographic magazine and elsewhere, scientists would introduce Olman to wider scientific and popular audiences. This article explores this history in order to understand scientists’ attempts to make sense of a new region as they documented the Olmec and Olman’s fauna. These collaborative scientific practices underline the need for ecological attention to how disciplinary knowledge- making practices interact during field research, an argument that is extended in a consideration of museum collections architectures. The so-called “Olmec Problem” became the subject of heated debate in the 1930s and 1940s. For several decades, strange objects had been surfacing in Mexico and in collections abroad, objects that fit uneasily in existing taxo- nomies of pre-Columbian cultures. They inspired wonder in their viewers and admiration for their makers, manifesting an ability with materials, an attention to form, and a handling of line and volume that impressed and fasci- nated modernist artists, archaeologists, and others (Pool 2007). As Matthew Stirling admit- ted at a 1967 conference, “[T]he bait that hooked me into a career of Olmec research was a small blue jade mask in the Berlin museum.... I think all of us felt that it must have taken a remarkable culture to produce art objects with such a power- ful effect and that something should be done to find out more about it” (1968, 1). While many of these objects surfaced in private collections with dubious provenience, it became clear that most of them came from the jungles and Gulf coast lowlands of Tabasco and Veracruz, an area that had been relatively devoid of archaeological interest. In Aztec times, the region had been called Olman, the land of rub- ber, a name that began to stick to the area’s ancient inhabitants. 1 The emergent Olmec constituted both a source of fascination and a challenge to archae- ologists. It became clear that both the Olmec and southern Mexico itself required exploration and scientific explanation. As Stirling’s reflec- tions suggest, aesthetic wonder quickly gave way to determination; a pressing need arose to determine the Olmec’s age, the extent of their civilization, and its relation to the Maya and other pre-Columbian cultures. Archaeologists worked quickly and, in 1942, Alfonso Caso declared that the Olmec were Mesoamerica’s cultura madre, or mother culture, the first civili- zation from which all subsequent ones had grown (Caso 1942). While many of the details of the cultura madre claim have since been Robert J. Kett (rkett@uci.edu), Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, 3151 Social Science Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697. 173 Volume 57 Number 2 April 2014