Earl Halstead Morris, known as Earl Morris or Earl H. Morris, was an American archeologist known for his contributions to Southwest archaeology. He is also believed to have partially inspired the fictional Indiana Jones of George Lucas' popular Indiana Jones film series. [1] He was born on October 24, 1889, in New Mexico, grew up near what became the Aztec Ruins National Monument, and died on June 24, 1956, in Boulder, Colorado. Morris was buried in Aztec, New Mexico.
Born in 1889 in Chama, New Mexico Territory, Earl Morris was the only child of Juliette Amanda Halstead and Scott Neering Morris. What would become Earl's lifelong interest in Native American material culture began with his father, who was a collector of Native American antiquities and pothunter. [2] Earl married fellow archaeologist Ann Axtell in 1923 and they had two daughters, Elizabeth Ann and Sarah Lane. Elizabeth later went on to get a degree in anthropology from the University of Arizona. After a lingering illness, Ann died in 1945. In 1947, he married Lucile Bowman.
Morris received formal education from the University of Colorado in Boulder where he received his B.A. in Psychology in 1914 and his Master's in 1916. In 1917, attended Columbia University but had to leave prior to receiving his doctorate. He also earned several honors. In 1931 the University of Colorado awarded him the Norlin Medal, and then in 1942 he received an honorary Doctor of Science degree. In 1953, Morris was awarded the Alfred Vincent Kidder Award for excellence in the fields of Southwestern and Mesoamerican archaeology.
Aside from the influence of his father, Morris's archaeological activity began in earnest after meeting Edgar L. Hewett on a train in 1912. Later that year, he began his first field excavation in the La Plata district of Southwestern Colorado. In 1912 he also worked at Quirigua, Guatemala, where he returned for additional work in 1914. After his studies, Morris returned to Aztec Ruins in 1917 as a representative of the American Museum of Natural History to explore the historic pueblo. In 1924, Morris worked for the Carnegie Institution of Washington and spent the next five years excavating at Chichen Itza, Yucatán.
Morris's first wife Ann Axtell Morris was critical to his research. [3] She traveled in tandem with him and other notable figures in archaeology throughout the Southwest United States and Mexico with support from the Carnegie Institution to conduct fieldwork in the 1920s and 1930s. [4] Among the many projects she was a part of, Ann was an important addition to the task of documenting and reconstructing the Temple of the Warriors in Chichen Itza. [5]
Earl Morris led a number of excavations in the field from 1916 to 1940 for the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU), the American Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the School of American Archaeology (SAA). These archaeological investigations led to the 69 publications from 1911 to 1956 and to extensive new collections of pottery, stone implements, baskets, sandals, and other artifacts for the institutions that supported his work. As a prominent member of the archaeological community, Morris corresponded and collaborated with influential archaeologists, anthropologists, and other scientists of the era, including Nels Nelson, A. V. Kidder, Jesse Nusbaum, Walter Fewkes, Edgar Hewett, Clark Wissler, A. E. Douglass, Junius Henderson, and Sylvanus G. Morley.
The contributions of Earl Morris to the field of North American archaeology includes vast collections of museum artifacts and archives of personal and professional notes, correspondence, and other manuscripts. These materials are currently housed at several institutions, but a large portion of them are at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History (CUMNH) and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The CUMNH also houses the Earl H. Morris Archive, containing unpublished documents and photographs from his fieldwork and research.
A chacmool is a form of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican sculpture depicting a reclining figure with its head facing 90 degrees from the front, supporting itself on its elbows and supporting a bowl or a disk upon its stomach. These figures possibly symbolised slain warriors carrying offerings to the gods; the bowl upon the chest was used to hold sacrificial offerings, including pulque, tamales, tortillas, tobacco, turkeys, feathers, and incense. In Aztec examples, the receptacle is a cuauhxicalli. Chacmools were often associated with sacrificial stones or thrones. The chacmool form of sculpture first appeared around the 9th century AD in the Valley of Mexico and the northern Yucatán Peninsula.
Mayapan is a Pre-Columbian Maya site a couple of kilometers south of the town of Telchaquillo in Municipality of Tecoh, approximately 40 km south-east of Mérida and 100 km west of Chichen Itza; in the state of Yucatán, Mexico. Mayapan was the political and cultural capital of the Maya in the Yucatán Peninsula during the Late Post-Classic period from the 1220s until the 1440s. Estimates of the total city population are 15,000–17,000 people, and the site has more than 4,000 structures within the city walls, and additional dwellings outside.
Coba is an ancient Maya city on the Yucatán Peninsula, located in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. The site is the nexus of the largest network of stone causeways of the ancient Maya world, and it contains many engraved and sculpted stelae that document ceremonial life and important events of the Late Classic Period of Mesoamerican civilization. The adjacent modern village bearing the same name, reported a population of 1,278 inhabitants in the 2010 Mexican federal census.
Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson was a leading English Mesoamerican archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and epigrapher. While working in the United States, he dominated Maya studies and particularly the study of the Maya script until well into the 1960s.
The Itza are a Maya ethnic group native to the Péten region of northern Guatemala and parts of Belize. The majority of Itza are inhabitants of the city of Flores on Lake Petén Itzá, and nearby portions of Belize where they form an ethnic minority.
Augustus Henry Julian Le Plongeon was a British-American archeologist and photographer who studied the pre-Columbian ruins of America, particularly those of the Maya civilization on the northern Yucatán Peninsula. While his writings contain many notions that were not well received by his contemporaries and were later disproven, Le Plongeon left a lasting legacy in his photographs documenting the ancient ruins. He was one of the earliest proponents of Mayanism.
El Castillo, also known as the Temple of Kukulcan' is a Mesoamerican step-pyramid that dominates the center of the Chichen Itza archaeological site in the Mexican state of Yucatán. The temple building is more formally designated by archaeologists as Chichen Itza Structure 5B18.
K’uk’ulkan, also spelled Kukulkan, is the serpent deity of Mayan mythology. It is closely related to the deity Qʼuqʼumatz of the Kʼicheʼ people and to Quetzalcoatl of Aztec mythology. Prominent temples to Kukulkan are found at archaeological sites in the Yucatán Peninsula, such as Chichen Itza, Uxmal and Mayapan.
Louis Henri Jean Charlot was a French-born American painter and illustrator, active mainly in Mexico and the United States.
Alfred Marston Tozzer was an American anthropologist, archaeologist, linguist, and educator. His principal area of interest was Mesoamerican, especially Maya, studies. He was the husband of Margaret Castle Tozzer and father of figure skating champion Joan Tozzer.
Sylvanus Griswold Morley was an American archaeologist and epigrapher who studied the pre-Columbian Maya civilization in the early 20th century. Morley led extensive excavations of the Maya site of Chichen Itza on behalf of the Carnegie Institution and published several large compilations and treatises on Maya hieroglyphic writing. He also wrote popular accounts on the Maya for a general audience.
Yaxuna is a Maya archaeological site in the municipality of Yaxcabá in Yucatán, Mexico.
The Sacred Cenote is a water-filled sinkhole in limestone at the pre-Columbian Maya archaeological site of Chichen Itza, in the northern Yucatán Peninsula. It is located to the north of Chichen Itza's civic precinct, to which it is connected by a 300-metre (980 ft) sacbe, a raised pathway.
Chichén Itzá was a large pre-Columbian city built by the Maya people of the Terminal Classic period. The archeological site is located in Tinúm Municipality, Yucatán State, Mexico.
Chichen Itza and Tula have numerous architectural similarities in a number of their constructions. This Toltec-Maya connection is widely considered powerful, unprecedented, and unique in Mesoamerica. Unlike most Maya sites, some of Chichen Itza's buildings have the traits of the Toltecs, a historically powerful indigenous group from modern-day Mexico. The explanation of these similarities is a point of controversy among the scholars of the Toltec and Maya fields. Certain historical records caused many early scholars of the region to assume that a Toltec invasion from Tula, Hidalgo, usually placed in the ninth or tenth centuries, was responsible for a new wave of Mexican-style Maya buildings after the rest of the buildings in Chichen Itza were built. Other historical accounts imply a migration from Tula to Chichen Itza. An account of the Tula records a ruler of the Toltecs travelling east, which, paired with another account of Chichen that records a ruler from the west coming and teaching the Maya of that city many things, supported a direct influence of the Toltecs on the Maya around 900–1000 A.D. However, recent radiocarbon dating suggests that Chichen Itza's ‘mexicanized’ and pure Maya constructions were built at the same time, and that both were built prior to any recorded Toltec invasion, and prior to the banishing of the semi-historical ruler. The precise connection between these two nations is unknown, and fiercely contested among scholars of Toltecs and Maya, but it is not disputed that no other counterparts to these two cities are found in the 800 mile distance between them. Established contradicting theories and a lack of information cause the precise relationship between Chichen Itza and Tula, Hidalgo to be fervently contested.
Incidents of Travel in Chichén Itzá is an ethnographic film . Jeff Himpele and Quetzil E. Castañeda, filmmakers and producers. Production 1995 and 1997. Postproduction release: 1997.
The Kejache were a Maya people in northern Guatemala at the time of Spanish contact in the 17th century. The Kejache territory was located in the Petén Basin in a region that takes in parts of both Guatemala and Mexico. Linguistic evidence indicates that the Kejache shared a common origin with the neighbouring Itzas to their southeast and the Kejache may have occupied the general region since the Classic period. The Kejache were initially contacted by conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1525; they were later in prolonged contact with the Spanish as the latter opened a route southwards towards Lake Petén Itzá.
Hacienda Chichén is located within the ancient Maya city of Chichen Itza, in the county of Tinum, Yucatan, Mexico. It was one of the first haciendas established in Yucatán and was in ruins by 1847. Edward Herbert Thompson, U.S. consul in Yucatán, purchased Hacienda Chichén, including the archaeological site visited today in 1894. He excavated, explored and exported goods from the site to the Peabody Museum for over 3 decades. In 1926, he was charged with trafficking of antiquities but the charges were later dropped and his heirs sold the site. The purchaser, Fernando Barbachano Peon is credited with beginning the tourism industry of Yucatán and being the first hotelier to change a hacienda into a hotel.
Kulubá is an ancient Maya civilization city and archeological site in Mexico. It is located in Tizimín Municipality, northeast Yucatan, Mexico. The site contains a palace, an altar, ruins of two residences, and a round structure believed to be an oven. The palace measures 6 metres (20 ft) tall, 55 metres (180 ft) long and 15 metres (49 ft) wide, and is believed to have been inhabited between 600-1050 CE.
Ann Axtell Morris (1900–1945) was an American archaeologist, artist, and author who largely worked in the U.S. southwest and Mexico.
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