Other travels through the Yucatán convinced Morley to abandon linguistics for a career in archaeology. Back at Harvard in 1905 he studied anthropology under Tozzer and read Daniel Brinton’s Primer of Maya Hieroglyphics—his first exposure to a subject that would become his lifelong forte.

In 1907 Morley participated in edgar lee hewett’s field-methods school in archaeology in the Southwest, along with alfred v. kidder. His engineering training in areal survey proved to be invaluable, and he continued to work for Hewett until 1915, when he was hired by the Carnegie Institution’s new Department of Central American Archaeology. His first book, Introduction to the Study of the Maya Hieroglyphs, a synthesis of what was then known about maya epigraphy, was published in the same year. In the Supplementary Series in the Maya Inscriptions (1916) Morley brought together drawings of all lunar glyphs, thereby allowing John Edward Teeple to solve the riddle of the lunar count.

Over the next decade Morley searched and surveyed some of the most inaccessible parts of Mayan territory. Traveling by mule and camping with few creature comforts, surrounded by jungle, suffering from malaria, and surviving Mexican bandits, Morley visited Copan, Tulum, and Uaxactun. The artist william henry holmes and archaeologist Samuel Lothrop were part of his field team. From 1917 to 1919 he worked for U.S. naval intelligence in Washington, D.C., before returning to the field in 1919. Until 1922 Morley spent most of his time in the Petén looking for Mayan date inscriptions, and he visited costa rica and guatemala to study Mayan influences there. In 1920 he completed the Inscriptions of Copán, the first book to discuss in detail all the texts of a single site.

Morley’s available time for deciphering glyphs was seriously eroded by the constraints of field trips and lecture tours for the Carnegie Institution. He still managed to provide a number of the meanings for glyphs and demonstrated that almost every Mayan monument was erected to “mark the close of a katun (a period of time in the Mayan calendar) or one of its quarters.” Perhaps as important to Mayan archaeology as his scholarly work was his insistence that the public become aware of the achievements of the Maya. He delivered lectures throughout the United States and wrote popular articles on the maya civilization.

Morley’s plan of making a thorough study of the Maya at Chichén Itzá, which was why the Carnegie Institution had employed him, was never realized, for it was overtaken by his desire to find and decipher Mayan glyphs. As early as 1925 the institution began to consider a leadership change and a reorganization. Kidder was appointed as director of the new Division of Historical Research in an attempt to introduce a multidisciplinary strategy to the Mayan project. Morley continued his pioneering work on Mayan glyphs until 1947, when he became director of the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe.

Douglas R. Givens

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 323–324.

Morocco

See Maghreb

Mortillet, Gabriel de

(1821–1898)

Gabriel de Mortillet studied to be a priest in Grenoble and then went to Paris to study engineering. His fascination with geology and conchology (the study of shells) soon eclipsed his interest in engineering, and his radical socialist political beliefs led to his exile to Savoy, italy, in 1848. Four years later Mortillet cataloged the geological collections at the museum in Geneva, and in 1854 he moved back to Savoy to look after the museum in Annecy, until the province was annexed by france in 1857. From 1858 until 1863 Mortillet worked in Italy for the Lombard-Venetian Railway Company and began his research into prehistory, prompted by his interest in the discovery of Neolithic settlements in the lakes of switzerland.

In 1864 Mortillet returned to Paris and founded the prehistory review Les Materiaux pour l’Histoire Positive et Philosophique de l’Homme, becoming