were a particular passion for Morley. The Carnegie Institution at Morley's urging accordingly hired Thompson, and he soon found himself at work in Chichen Itza, involved with its architectural reconstruction (for which task Thompson had no particular qualifications). During the 1925–26 season, Thompson became well-acquainted with Morley, the two of them along with their wives (the newly married Thompson was in fact on his honeymoon) making several side-trips together. However, at the end of the 1926 season, Thompson left Carnegie's employ to take up a post offered by Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. This post offered Thompson far greater freedom and diversity for his research. Thompson and Morley were to remain close and like-minded colleagues in spite of this move. Towards the end of the Chichen Itza project, Morley came across the drawings of a young artist and draftsperson, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, who as an unpaid excavator had accompanied a 1936–37 University of Pennsylvania Museum expedition to the Maya site of Piedras Negras. The quality of her reconstructive panorama drawings (depicting what the site "might have looked like" when in use) so impressed Morley that he determined to enroll her onto the Carnegie staff. However, this was in the midst of the Great Depression and funds for hiring were scarce; it was also not clear whether Morley had the appropriate authority to do so. After several entreaties, Morley again came up with an innovative funding scheme whereby he devised two campaigns to raise money by subscription to send Proskouriakoff to Copán and the Yucatán. These were successful, and in 1939, Proskouriakoff transferred onto the Carnegie payroll and was duly dispatched to Copán to gather data for reconstructive drawings of that site. Morley's support of Proskouriakoff was to prove fortuitous to Maya scholarship, as she went on to a lengthy and successful career with the Carnegie Institution and was lauded as one of the foremost Maya scholars of her time. Views on ancient Maya society Morley maintained that ancient Maya society was essentially a united theocracy, and one which was almost exclusively devoted to astronomical observations and mystically noting (even "worshipping") the passage of time. These ideas (which Thompson's later work would develop to its fullest extent) are now extensively modified, and although astronomical and calendric observations were clearly important to the Maya, the people themselves are now seen in more historical, realistic terms—concerned also with dynastic succession, political conquests, and