As historians of archaeology continue to explore how cultural contexts condition the interpretation of archaeological data, it is useful to investigate how fieldwork was a social experience as well as a scholarly endeavour. Walter Lehmann (1878-1939; Figure 1) was an eminent specialist in the ethnology and archaeology of Mesoamerica during the height of Germany's power as a global empire. His experience offers a case study of how national and imperial identities influence the logistic apparatus of field research.

Figure 1.

Walter Lehmann c. 1907-1909 examines a figurine acquired during his Central America expedition ( Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin).

A talented linguist, Lehmann synthesised his extensive philological knowledge with archaeological research to reconstruct the culture histories of peoples in Mexico and Central America in pre-Hispanic times. Over the course of his career, Lehmann published numerous monographs and well over 200 articles, essays and book reviews in the leading ethnological journals of his time. Named as a director of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin in 1921, he also lectured widely throughout Europe and the Americas in an effort to foster appreciation for ancient American arts and languages among scholars and laypeople alike (Riese 1983). Much of this work built upon his career-defining, two-year journey from Panama to Mexico beginning in October 1907. The vocabularies assembled during this expedition set the benchmark for linguistic studies of Central America for decades, and his photographic and archaeological collections continue to yield new insight to Central America scholars today (Künne 2003; G. Torres 2009). Examining the field diaries from this journey, archived at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin (IAI, Nachlass Lehmann [Reisenotizen]), reveals how Lehmann's immersion into the tensions of transnational capitalism affected his personal and academic goals as he completed this highly successful trip.

Lehmann lamented the pace of economic development in Central America and its effect on the indigenous populations, even as his own professional advancement relied on the same social networks that supported foreign investment and imperialism. The vibrant amalgam of European, North American, African and Asian peoples brought together on the Central American isthmus complicated his scholarly mission of identifying pre-Hispanic cultural traits. He was quick to disparage instances of cultural admixture, and, like most of his European and North American contemporaries, he characterised the region's Hispanic populations as degenerate, arrogant, indolent and untrustworthy. He viewed them as Yankee imitators lacking any sense of conviviality through music, drinking, and art (IAI, Nachlass Lehmann [Reisenotizen], Box 6, Notebook 115: 18 Dec 1908 and Notebook 108: undated entry). In contrast, the small enclaves of surviving indigenes and German expatriates resonated with Lehmann's understanding of true culture, and he postulated a certain affinity with his indigenous counterparts. Lehmann surmised that despite differences in cultural advancement between civilised and primitive peoples, 'the individual can surely be or become happy in either stage of development' (IAI, Nachlass Lehmann [Reisenotizen], Box 6, Notebook 115: 20 Dec 1908).

In addition to serving as a conceptual foil for understanding the cultural condition of Central American peoples, the social network of German expatriates also proved to be immensely beneficial for the logistics of Lehmann's research agenda. In the Costa Rican capital of San José, the first major research destination on Lehmann's fieldwork itinerary, he was greeted by vice-consul Felix Wiss, a German citizen from Nürnberg. Lehmann and Wiss would come to spend many evenings in the city's German Club enjoying intellectual conversations over cocktails, music, theatre or dancing. Wiss briefed Lehmann on the activities of other collectors in the region, most notably the tycoon Minor C. Keith, who oversaw excavations on his extensive banana plantations and forbade archaeologists from encroaching on his territory. Recruiting middlemen through contacts at the German Club, Lehmann and Wiss sought nonetheless to arrange excavations on Keith's land in an effort to break his monopoly on regional antiquities (IAI, Nachlass Lehmann [Reisenotizen], Box 5, Notebook 127: 25 Nov 1907 and Box 6, Notebook 112: 22 May 1908, 16 June 1908 and 19 June 1908; Fischer 2001:158).

Both the consulate and the German Club quickly came to serve as meeting places for local antiquities dealers, with whom Lehmann negotiated the purchase of artefacts for shipment back to Berlin. Many of these collectors were landowners who invited Lehmann to carry out his own excavations on their estates in the nearby coffee-growing regions of the central valley of Costa Rica. Lehmann had excavated on a German-owned coffee hacienda outside of San José by the second week of his stay in the city, and he resided at another German estate for a total of four weeks in December 1907 and January 1908. During these visits, indigenous plantation workers provided Lehmann with vocabularies for his linguistic research, labour for his archaeological excavations, and models for anthropological measurements (IAI, Nachlass Lehmann [Reisenotizen], Box 5, Notebook 127: 13-21 Nov 1907; Quesada 2001: 478-95).

Lehmann's diaries demonstrate that lucrative archaeological sites were entangled with capitalist enterprises in the region, and his ability to access them in order to recover original data depended on his mobilisation of a network largely coalescing around a shared German language or nationality. The daily experience of Lehmann's research both his status as a salvager of indigenous cultures and his fellowship among a cordial circle of cosmopolitan German expatriates reinforced the concept of cultural identities as entities that create distinct boundaries between individuals inhabiting an otherwise multinational landscape. This notion was consistent with his culture-historical research, but it also encompassed his personal sentiments as expressed midway through the journey: 'Even if travel, frequently driven by feelings of inner unrest and spiritual imbalance, serves no further purpose than to clarify one's self, to sharpen one's senses, and to learn the value of one's homeland, it has already accomplished much' (IAI, Nachlass Lehmann [Reisenotizen], Box 6, Notebook 108: 25 Nov 1908). Thus, Lehmann's anthropological insights emerged from a cultural terrain shaped in part by the familiar habits of fellow countrymen, inviting further investigations into how logistical and affective ties moderate the detachment of even the most intrepid of scholars.