40 Facts About Sylvanus Morley

Sylvanus Morley conducted espionage in Mexico on behalf of the United States during World War I, but the scope of those activities only came to light well after his death.

Sylvanus Morley was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, the eldest of six children.

When Sylvanus Morley was ten years old, he moved with his family to Colorado, and his secondary education was completed at Buena Vista and Colorado Springs.

Sylvanus Morley duly enrolled in a civil engineering degree at PMC, graduating in 1904.

Nonetheless immediately upon graduating from PMC Sylvanus Morley got his wish, and was able to attend Harvard University in pursuit of an undergraduate degree in archaeology.

Sylvanus Morley spent several weeks at Chichen Itza as a guest of Edward Thompson, where he assisted with the dredging of the Cenote Sagrado.

Sylvanus Morley made some significant contributions to the definition of a particular "Santa Fe" style of pre-Columbian architecture.

Sylvanus Morley completed a Master of Arts degree at Harvard, awarded in 1908.

Several times Sylvanus Morley needed to convince suspicious soldiers of his bona fides, and was almost unmasked on occasion.

In one incident in 1917, Sylvanus Morley was prevented from photographing an old Spanish fort by a party of Honduran soldiers who had been distrustfully monitoring his presence.

Sylvanus Morley protested strongly to the local authorities, proclaiming his credentials as an archaeologist ought to be above suspicion.

The local authorities remained unmoved, and only when Sylvanus Morley had arranged for a letter of introduction signed by the Honduran president Francisco Bertrand did they allow him to continue.

Sylvanus Morley produced extensive analyses on many issues and observations of the region, including detailed coastline charting and identification of political and social attitudes which could be viewed as "threatening" to US interests.

Sylvanus Morley rediscovered the last of these sites.

Kidder, and Sylvanus Morley was left to concentrate on Chichen Itza.

Slightly built and not noted for possessing a strong constitution, Sylvanus Morley saw his health deteriorate over the years spent laboring in the Central American jungles under often adverse conditions.

Sylvanus Morley gave Merriam a tour of the area he believed would be best for excavation and restoration, a mound complex then known as the Group of One Thousand Columns.

When Sylvanus Morley and his team returned in 1924 to commence their excavations, Chichen Itza was a sprawling complex of several large ruined buildings and many smaller ones, most of which lay concealed under mounds of earth and vegetation.

The later years of the project would increasingly concentrate on completing the restorative work on the principal structures, for Sylvanus Morley always had an eye on the dual purpose of the project: to research, but rebuild to generate the promised revenue from tourism.

Sylvanus Morley was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1940.

Sylvanus Morley was appointed director of the School of American Research and the Museum of New Mexico, following the death of Edgar Lee Hewett in 1946.

Sylvanus Morley 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, and has been posthumously revised and reprinted several times, although since the 1980s Sylvanus Morley's name is no longer listed as the main author.

Sylvanus Morley last visited Yucatan and the Hacienda Chenku in spring of 1948, just months before his death.

Sylvanus Morley died in Santa Fe on September 2,1948, aged 65, two years after the publication of The Ancient Maya.

Sylvanus Morley 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.

In 1925, a young English Cambridge anthropology student named John Eric Sidney Thompson wrote to Sylvanus Morley seeking employment with the Carnegie programme on digs in Central America.

The Carnegie Institution at Sylvanus Morley's urging accordingly hired Thompson, and he soon found himself at work in Chichen Itza, involved with its architectural reconstruction.

Thompson and Sylvanus Morley were to remain close and like-minded colleagues in spite of this move.

However, this was in the midst of the Great Depression and funds for hiring were scarce; it was not clear whether Sylvanus Morley had the appropriate authority to do so.

Sylvanus Morley believed that the southern centers such as Copan and Quirigua had been united in the Classical period under what he termed the "Old Empire".

The convincing evidence which was to overturn this view became known only after Sylvanus Morley's death, starting with Yuri Knorozov's work in the 1950s.

Sylvanus Morley's talent was not so much to make innovations, but rather to publicise and explain the workings of the various systems.

Sylvanus Morley was particularly proficient at recovering calendar dates from well-worn and weathered inscriptions, owing to his great familiarity with the various glyphic styles of the tzolk'in, haab' and Long Count elements.

Sylvanus Morley's publications are now generally superseded, except for his calendrical compilations.

Sylvanus Morley had particular talents in communicating his fascination for the subject to a wider audience, and in his lifetime became quite widely known as perhaps the quintessential model of an early 20th-century Central American scholar and explorer, complete with his ever-present pith helmet.

Sylvanus Morley maintained a daily diary his entire adult life detailing his discoveries, projects, and excavations.

Sylvanus Morley was originally baptised Sylvanus Griswold Small, but changed his surname from Small to Morley in his early twenties when his father did likewise.

Sylvanus Morley was an undergraduate at Harvard while I was in the Grad.

Sylvanus G Morley died in 1970; his son Thomas published his autobiographical notes posthumously.