Maya Archaeologist is an autobiographical account of explorations in Mayan ruins by J. Eric Thompson, one of the world's foremost authorities on the Maya Indians of Mexico and Central America. Based on his expeditions from 1926 to 1936 - when conditions in the Maya area were very close to those in the years of the Conquest - this book is an intensely personal account of the investigation of the ""stone cities,"" such as Uxmal, Chichén Itzá, Copán, Tikal, and Quirigua, as well as lively portraits of the archaeologists who probed this civilization - Morley, Gann, Ruppert, Vaillant, Roys, and many others.