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.