Turn Right at Machu Picchu

by Mark Adams

Digging for the Truth

  In and Around Machu Picchu

  One of the major factors in the rise of archaeology had been the birth of the public museum. Starting in the eighteenth century, antiquities that had been stashed away in private collections across Europe were converted into public property, accessible to the general populace. The British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris were just two repositories of culture founded on the accumulated trophies of wealthy hoarders. As Daniel Boorstin notes in his book The Discoverers, the very word “tourist,” which had come to represent the decline of serious adventure travel in the eyes of John Leivers, was popularized after 1800 to describe the “mobile community of transient spectators” who made a grand tour of these new collections. The Smithsonian Institution was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1846, soon to be followed by natural history museums in most major cities and on several college campuses. The acres of display space in these new institutions needed to be filled.

  At Yale, where the pioneering paleontologist Othniel Marsh had encouraged a wealthy uncle to fund the Peabody Museum, there was great hope that the hastily arranged “Peruvian Expedition of 1912, Under the Auspices of Yale University and the National Geographic Society” would provide such artifacts. If Machu Picchu had really eluded the Spaniards and vanished into the jungle since the sixteenth century, there was no telling what archaeological treasures might be hiding beneath its granite temples. “We all hope that you will be able to excavate and bring back a shipload of antiquities for your museum at Yale,” Grosvenor wrote to his new contributor.

  Grosvenor’s cheerleading, unthinkable today, would have seemed unremarkable at the time. Peru’s artifacts had been shipped out of the country with few restrictions since Francisco Pizarro’s ransom deal with Atahualpa. By the early twentieth century, American museums were among the world’s most eager customers for pre-Columbian treasures. One New York newspaper reporter, receiving a tour of a new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History’s Peruvian Hall in 1906, observed merrily that the “choice personal ornaments of gold and silver, rich garments, pottery, etc.,” on display “were wrested mainly from ancient burial sites.”

  As the 1912 expedition came together, however, attitudes in Peru toward its national heritage were changing almost week to week. Bingham’s very public search for Manco Inca’s lost capital had mobilized Peruvian intellectuals, who were fighting to preserve their country’s indigenous treasures. Within days of his 1911 visit to Machu Picchu, Bingham had received word from the prefect of the Cusco region that he was forbidden to undertake any excavations, a warning that Bingham brushed off because he wasn’t planning to do any digging. (An indication of how fast the atmosphere was changing in Peru: the order came from J. J. Nuñez, the same official who had invited Bingham to Choquequirao two years earlier to observe the treasure hunting that Nuñez had undertaken with explosives.) A second, stronger governmental decree was issued from Lima as Bingham returned from Espiritu Pampa. The exportation of artifacts from Peru without official consent was now “absolutely prohibited.”

  As he hurried to assemble the 1912 expedition, Bingham reached out once again to President Taft, asking if the White House might help convince President Leguia to grant an exception to Yale, allowing Bingham to excavate and bring the Peabody Museum whatever artifacts he found. Taft was happy to oblige, and a deal was quickly negotiated. Bingham would receive a concession to dig, and he would split any unearthed antiquities fifty-fifty with Peru. From his half, Bingham also agreed to turn over one third of any “treasures, monuments and whatever other riches that might be found” to the owner of the land on which Machu Picchu sat.

  Bingham’s desire to prove that the bones he found near Cusco were those of a prehistoric man was so well known that it had become fodder for jokes. “Prof. Bingham might be better engaged if he started out to find the prehistoric woman instead of the prehistoric man,” wrote one popular gazette. “We do not believe that the prehistoric woman belonged to a woman’s club, although she may have wielded one in the interests of the family.” To Bingham, confirming the age of the Cusco Man (as some were calling the glacial bones) was serious enough that he arranged to bring George Eaton, the Peabody’s curator of osteology, on the expedition. Preliminary estimates had ranged from ten thousand to fifty thousand years. Determining when, exactly, humans had migrated to the Western Hemisphere was one of the most hotly debated topics in the sciences at the time. The Smithsonian Institution’s Aleš Hrdlička, the most prominent anthropologist in the United States, had recently journeyed to Argentina to view some skeletal remains that scientists hoped would establish South America as the cradle of humanity. Hrdlička returned unconvinced that homo sapiens had inhabited the Americas for more than a few thousand years.

  When Bingham’s team arrived in the Andes, a close examination of the bones was made almost immediately. Eaton reviewed some animal remains found in the deposit, which Bingham had excitedly hypothesized were those of a long-extinct bison hunted by the Cusco Man. After a reconnaissance mission to a local butcher shop, Eaton decided that they were actually the bones of a modern domestic cow. The finding negated Bingham’s theory that humans might have inhabited South America going back to the Ice Age. He wired his editors at Harper’s, pleading with them to kill a suddenly obsolete article he’d written about the bones’ likely historical importance. It was the first sign that 1912 wasn’t going to be a replay of 1911.

  Bad news continued to pile up. The native laborers Bingham conscripted were unenthusiastic about clearing the ruins at Machu Picchu, which had vanished again under tropical foliage in less than a year. One of Bingham’s key assistants lost his footing while climbing Huayna Picchu and nearly plummeted two thousand feet to his death; he was falling toward the Urubamba River when he grabbed a mesquite bush, almost tearing his right arm off. A week of “back breaking” digging at the Principal Temple yielded nothing, Bingham wrote. “Not even a bone or potsherd.” The dearth of discoveries, plus ample evidence of looting, made it clear that Yale’s was not the first expedition to search for whatever had been buried at the abandoned city. A 50-cent reward that Bingham offered to “any workman who would report the whereabouts of a cave containing a skull, and who would leave the cave exactly as he had found it” spurred the quick discovery of dozens of graves. Most were located by Alvarez and Richarte, two of the Machu Picchu farmers who had welcomed Bingham to their mountaintop the previous year. When Alvarez disappeared for a few days, though, osteologist Eaton was told by another laborer that “Alvarez’s trouble is in his testes, and that the other Indians say the trouble has been inflicted by the spirits of the dead Incas whose graves Alvarez was robbing.” Then Richarte vanished, too. “Perhaps they really are afraid of the spirits,” Eaton wrote in his journal.

  Bingham left the excavation of Machu Picchu under Eaton’s supervision and went off in pursuit of new discoveries in the nearby cloud forest. When he paid a return visit to the nearby hacienda Huadquiña, the son-in-law of the proprietress, an “enthusiastic amateur archaeologist” named Tomás Alvistur, delighted Bingham with a report that “some of the Indians on the plantation knew of three localities where there were Inca ruins, so they said, that had not been visited by white men.” These “feudal tenants,” as Bingham called the Huadquiña laborers, had zero interest in leading Bingham to these sites. As their overlord, Alvistur gave them no choice.

  The first site the team encountered after climbing five thousand feet was Llactapata. Bingham hastily measured and photographed what he called the “relatively unimportant” ruins, pausing just long enough to wonder “what connection the people who built and occupied this mountain stronghold had to the other occupants of the valley”—the residents of Machu Picchu. Bingham pressed on through a second unpleasant day, at the end of which the explorer was shown another site, known as Palcay. There, in the middle of the night, the Huadquiña workers deserted. The discoverer of Machu Picchu needed a young boy who lived in a hut near the ruins to
guide him back to the nearest town.

  Bingham’s sophomore slump continued. Vitcos, the most promising site he had found aside from Machu Picchu, had been picked clean long before he arrived in 1911. “The existence of scattered boulders and torn down walls would seem to show a violent attempt at treasure hunting in the past,” Bingham wrote in his journal. The entire region along the Vilcabamba River had been swept by deadly plagues of smallpox and typhus, and the native workers Bingham was able to round up were “insolent.” A week’s work turned up not a single artifact of note, only “a handful of rough potsherds.”

  Back at Machu Picchu, Bingham was taking no chances. The crew carefully shielded its museum-quality finds from the prying eyes of its government overseer. The Yale team strip-mined the site, following the director’s instructions to note carefully where every bone chip and pot fragment had come from. Among the best finds were several small bronzes, a few pots, two carved stone boxes, some silver shawl pins and a copper bracelet. The vast bulk of what workers packed into ninety-three boxes at the end of the dig were broken ceramics and human remains.

  Upon returning to Lima, however, Bingham learned that he might not be leaving Peru with any artifacts at all. Yale’s concession had been arranged with President Leguia as a sort of gentleman’s agreement. Bingham had presumed that Leguia—a political strongman whose unpopular dictatorial tendencies would, years later, lead to his incarceration—could arrange for the Congress to approve the fifty-fifty split when the legislature opened for business in July. It was a serious misreading of Peru’s political climate. Antipathy toward Leguia was so strong that a national uprising forced him out of office. When Bingham met with the new populist head of state, Guillermo Billinghurst, the president informed the explorer that he considered Yale’s concession to be “a disgrace.” Anticipating the legal trouble that would arise a century later, Lima’s newspapers portrayed Bingham as a Yankee imperialist looking to steal the country’s treasures and dispatch them to Yale. “I am blue, blue, blue,” Bingham wrote to Alfreda. “This has been the hardest, most discouraging and least productive of my expeditions.”

  Just as the expedition was devolving into a complete disaster, Billinghurst offered a surprising solution. Yale would be required to stop excavating as of December 1, earlier than expected. At that time, Bingham would be allowed to export, pending a thorough inspection, not just the half of the objects that he had agreed to, but everything that Yale had found.

  There was one catch with the new agreement. Peru reserved the right to “exact” from Yale “the return of the unique and duplicate objects that it has extracted.” In other words, the Peabody Museum was welcome to display the fruits of Bingham’s labors at Machu Picchu. But Peru could demand them back whenever it wanted.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Yale v. Peru

  Near Washington, D.C.

  To understand how Bingham’s actions in 1912 dragged his beloved Yale into court a hundred years later, I had to travel about four thousand miles to the café of a Barnes and Noble in suburban Washington, D.C., where I met with Eliane Karp-Toledo. In a country populated by circumspect brunettes, the former first lady of Peru was almost as famous for her fiery red hair and flamboyant native-inspired accessorizing as she was for her far-left politics and inability to keep her strong opinions to herself. Her strawberry tresses (the closest shade in the Crayola palette would fall, appropriately, somewhere between Outrageous Orange and Radical Red) were held up by a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and she was wearing Stanford sweats (she had recently taught there) and an olive-drab military-style shirt that from twenty paces appeared to be emblazoned with that dewy-eyed portrait of Che Guevara. Lady Bird Johnson this was not.

  I have no idea if any president in Peruvian history other than Alejandro Toledo has been married or not, because no one has ever expressed an opinion to me about any first lady other than Karp-Toledo. The day we met she had been gone from Peru for four years and people there still talked about her all the time. She was usually compared to one of three women: Eva Peron, probably because she had political ambitions and was suspected to be the real power behind her husband; Imelda Marcos, because she sometimes seemed ridiculous and was suspected of living luxuriously on taxpayer money (charges were filed but never proven); and Marie Antoinette, for reasons that didn’t really make sense except that she was unpopular. She did, though, offer me a very cake-like muffin when I sat down.

  I wanted to meet Karp-Toledo because she was widely perceived—largely through her own efforts—to be Hiram Bingham’s worst living enemy. In 2002, the Yale scholars Richard Burger and Lucy Salazar had approached Karp-Toledo about Peru’s cooperation in an exhibition they were assembling around Bingham’s Machu Picchu artifacts. Karp-Toledo agreed to a meeting with her own agenda in mind. She had asked some Peruvian researchers to look into the Bingham situation and came away convinced that the 1912 edict that Bingham had agreed to in order to get his relics out of the country required Yale to return the artifacts. “We provided talking points that represented the position of the president,” Karp-Toledo told me. “Everything started with two points: One, we wanted to take an inventory of the pieces at Yale. Two, everything had to come back to Peru. We said, ‘Nothing happens if you don’t start with those two points.’” Yale declined, and the Machu Picchu show toured without Peru’s assistance. Karp-Toledo kept pushing the subject. In the meantime, the National Geographic Society reviewed their records and sided with Peru—in their opinion, Yale should send everything back. “In 2005, my husband, in front of the board of directors of the National Geographic Society, picked up the phone and said to the president of Yale, ‘We need to discuss this.’ The president of Yale never returned the call, from the president of a sovereign nation. That’s very disdainful.”

  Karp-Toledo was certain that Yale had waited for the clock to run out on her husband’s administration. In September 2007, a year after the Toledos had left Peru for Stanford, Yale and Peru announced that a “memo of understanding” had been reached under which the Bingham items would be returned. Initially, it sounded like a good deal for both sides. Yale would give back more than three hundred “museum-quality” pieces. For the time being, the university would hold on to a less exciting-sounding “research collection.” Yale would reassemble the Burger-Salazar show, which would make a new tour of museums to help pay for a new Machu Picchu Museum and Research Center in Cusco. (Peru would pick up the rest of the tab.) With a little elbow grease, both parties could look forward to a 2011 ribbon cutting. The memo stated that “it is intended that the international opening of the new Museum will coincide with the centennial celebration of Bingham’s rediscovery of Machu Picchu.”

  “Do you know what they did?” Karp-Toledo asked me, her dainty hands throttling her gigantic herbal tea. “They sent a cartoonist to do the negotiating with Yale!” (Actually, the negotiator was Peru’s minister of housing, who’d written children’s books that were made into animated movies.) “I found this ‘memo of understanding’ on the Web, and I couldn’t believe it!” The fine-print details did seem to favor Yale. While the university acknowledged Peru’s title to all the artifacts, they reserved the right to keep the “fragments, bones and specimens” for use in “ongoing research,” which turned out to mean for an additional ninety-nine years.

  Karp-Toledo was out of power but she wasn’t powerless. In February 2008 she wrote an Op-Ed column for The New York Times, in which she said the agreement reflected Yale’s “colonial way of thinking.” The subsequent uproar made the deal politically untenable. By the end of 2008, Peru was suing for the artifacts in U.S. district court, on the grounds that Bingham’s concession clearly stated that the relics would be returned when requested. Yale rejected Peru’s claims as “stale and meritless.” And so, fifty years after Bingham’s death, Yale and Peru were fighting in court over his inheritance.

  I’d heard a radio interview in which Karp-Toledo had referred to Bingham as a huaquero, a grave robber. Did she still f
eel that way?

  “Of course. What’s the difference between Bingham and a huaquero at this point? Nothing. Bingham was very clever at marketing himself. He managed to make himself look like the discoverer. That’s a legend that needs to be completely thrown out.”

  At that moment a short man, wearing a dark blue suit with no tie, approached us, introduced himself and sat down with some colleagues at an adjacent table. It was Alejandro Toledo, the ex-president of Peru. I felt like I was meeting with the Peruvian government in exile, which had set up headquarters between Cookbooks and Self-Improvement.

  “In 2007–2008 the INC was finally allowed to go to the basement of the Peabody and do a proper inventory,” she said. “Yale said there were five thousand pieces; the INC counted more than forty thousand.” Karp-Toledo’s allies in Peru had since made quite a bit of hay with this alarming-sounding discrepancy; news accounts in Peru sometimes hinted that Bingham had secreted away a hoard equal to Atahualpa’s ransom. The truth, as Karp-Toledo acknowledged, was just a difference in accounting. What Yale counted as a single lot of human remains, Peru might count as dozens of fragments.

  Karp-Toledo roiled the waters further in 2009 when she was invited to speak on campus by the Yale Political Union. From the podium she brandished a 1916 letter from Bingham to Gilbert Grosvenor that read: “The objects found do not belong to us, but to the Peruvian government, which allowed us to take them from the country under the condition that they be returned.” He wasn’t, in fact, referring to the specific items he excavated in 1912, but Karp’s insinuation was clear—Bingham knew that what he’d taken from Peru was a loan, not a gift.

  Aside from a small group of scholars, administrators, and lawyers at Yale, almost everyone with an interest in Machu Picchu agreed that the artifacts Bingham took should be returned. There has long been, however, some (politically incorrect) doubt about Peru’s ability to take proper care of its antiquities. The National Museum in Lima was notoriously robbed of hundreds of irreplaceable objects in the late 1970s. The Museo Inka in Cusco had twenty-two gold pieces stolen in 1993. One well-known explorer I spoke with recalled handing mummies and artifacts over to the INC, only to return later and learn that they’d been lost or stolen. In 2008, a pair of vendors operating a souvenir shop off the main plaza in Cusco was found with 690 Inca and pre-Inca artifacts; they’d been hawking them on the Internet. Even Karp-Toledo agrees that thanks to the thriving huaquero industry, it’s an open secret in Peru that artifacts can be bought easily. I’d seen collections in private homes that rivaled what the Peabody owned.