this case, since the conquest occurred in the "degenerate" Post-Classic phase he found it acceptable. This view of the Toltec invasion of Yucatán became the one maintained by the majority of Mayanists. However, recent research from the mid-1990s onwards has now questioned this orthodoxy, to the point where many now hold an actual invasion did not take place, but the similarities in style are largely due to cultural diffusion and trade, and that in fact there is evidence that the diffusion in this period flowed in both directions. The chronology of Chichen Itza continues to be a source of debate, and the hoped-for answers to the mystery of the Classic Maya decline elusive (wholesale "Mexicanisation" by invading forces ruled out by the lack of these indicators in the central and southern sites). However, the Carnegie excavations did add significantly to the corpus of available information, and are notable for their scope alone, if not for fine details and quality of research. The site's reconstruction by Carnegie has proved to be a lasting one, and the site today is among the most visited of pre-Columbian ruins in all of Central America and Mexico, with in excess of a million visitors per year. Project completion and final years After almost twenty years, Carnegie's Chichen Itza project wound to a close in 1940, its restorative and investigative work complete and its objectives substantially met. Morley and his second wife Frances moved from the Hacienda Chichén, their home for many years, and rented the Hacienda Chenku, now within the city of Mérida, Yucatán. After the close of the Chichen Itza Project, Morley began spending more time in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he had lived half of the year every year since 1910. He was appointed director of the School of American Research and the Museum of New Mexico, following the death of Edgar Lee Hewett in 1946. He also began work on a large-scale popular work on ancient Maya society, which he completed and published in 1946. The Ancient Maya was to be one of his more successful works (outside of his popular writings in magazines), and has been posthumously revised and reprinted several times, although since the 1980s Morley's name is no longer listed as the main author. Morley last visited Yucatán and the Hacienda Chenku in spring of 1948, just months before his death. He escorted a party to the ruins