of Uxmal in February, on what was possibly his last visit to a Maya ruin. He died in Santa Fe on September 2, 1948, aged 65, two years after the publication of The Ancient Maya. He was buried in a plot in Santa Fe's Fairview Cemetery; his second wife Frances Rhoads Morley was interred in the same plot upon her death in 1955. Morley's personal research library is preserved and available for consultation at the Laboratory of Anthropology Library in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Theories and retrospective assessment In his day, Morley was widely regarded as one of the leading figures in Maya scholarship, in authority perhaps second only to Eric Thompson, whose views he mostly shared. From the late 1920s through to perhaps the mid-1970s, the reconstruction of ancient Maya society and history pieced together by Morley, Thompson and others constituted the "standard" interpretation against which competing views had to be measured. However, major advances made in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing and refinements in archaeological data which have been made since that time have now called into question much of this former "standard" interpretation, overturning key elements and significantly revising the Maya historical account. As far as Morley's own research is concerned, its reputation for soundness and quality has been downgraded somewhat in the light of recent reappraisals; yet he is still regarded as an important contributor to the field. Influences on other scholars Many Mayan scholars and archaeologists had their first research opportunity and employment under Morley's tutelage working on the various Carnegie projects. Of these, perhaps the two most notable were J. Eric S. Thompson and Tatiana Proskouriakoff. Thompson shortly became the field's most dominant figure and its uncontested expert. Together with Morley, he was most responsible for promulgating the view of the ancient Maya as peaceable astronomers, obsessed with time and calendric observations. This view became the prevailing one for the next several decades. Proskouriakoff also went on to establish a stellar career and a lifelong association with the Carnegie Institution; however, her researches ultimately provided the primary convincing evidence which later disproved much of what had been maintained by Thompson and Morley. In 1925, a young English Cambridge anthropology student named John Eric Sidney Thompson wrote to Morley seeking employment with the Carnegie programme on digs in Central America. Thompson had studied Morley's 1915 work and from that taught himself Maya calendrics, which