A ghost town in the Andes became
a treasured window into Inca history
after explorer Hiram Bingham
introduced it to the world.
MACHU PICCHU
“It seemed like an unbelievable
dream,” he wrote later.
Bingham acknowledged that
he was not the first to discover
Machu Picchu. Local people knew
about it, and a Peruvian tenant
farmer, Agustín Lizárraga, had
even inscribed his name on one
of its walls nearly a decade ear-
lier. But Bingham did bring the
mountaintop citadel to the world’s
attention as the account of his
work there, and at other sites in the
region, filled the April 1913 issue of
National Geographic.
Bingham was also the first to
study Machu Picchu scientifi-
cally. With financial support from
Yale and the National Geographic
Society, he returned twice to the
site. His crews cleared the vegeta-
tion that had reclaimed the peak,
shipped thousands of artifacts to
Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natu-
ral History—which were returned
to Peru by 2012—and mapped
and photographed the ruins. The
thousands of photos that he shot
would change archaeology for-
ever, demonstrating the power of
images to legitimize and popularize
the science.Enrique Porres and
other locals helped
Bingham explore and
excavate the site.
HIRAM BINGHAMON HANDS AND KNEES, THREE MEN CRAWLED UP A SLICK AND
steep mountain slope in Peru. It was the morning of July 24,
- Hiram Bingham III, a 35-year-old assistant professor of
Latin American history at Yale University, had set out in a
cold drizzle from his expedition camp on the Urubamba River
with two Peruvian companions to investigate reported ruins
on a towering ridge known as Machu Picchu (“old mountain”
in Quechua, the Inca language). The explorers chopped their
way through thick jungle, crawled across a “bridge” of slender
logs bound together with vines, and crept through under-
brush hiding venomous fer-de-lance snakes.
Two hours into the hike, at nearly 2,000 feet above the
valley floor, the climbers met two farmers who had moved
up the mountain to avoid tax collectors. The men assured
an increasingly skeptical Bingham that the rumored ruins
lay close at hand and sent a young boy along to lead the way.
When Bingham finally reached the site, he gaped in aston-
ishment at the scene before him. Rising out of the tangle of
undergrowth was a maze of terraces cut from escarpments
and walls fashioned without mortar, their stones fitting so
tightly together that not even a knife’s blade could fit between
them. The site would prove to be one of the greatest archae-
ological treasures of the 20th century: an intact Inca ghost
town hidden from the outside world for nearly 400 years.
1400 S PERU