Opinion - News Analysis   

Who got to Machu Picchu first?

From the postcards bearing his swashbuckling, fedora-topped image to the luxury train emblazoned with his name that runs to the foot of the mountain redoubt of Machu Picchu, reminders are ubiquitous here of Hiram Bingham, the Yale explorer long credited with revealing the so-called Lost City of the Incas to the outside world almost a century ago.

But in recent months, a confluence of contrary events has threatened to upend the legacy of Bingham, the ostensible model for the fictional Indiana Jones. Peru has threatened legal action against Yale to recover thousands of artefacts Bingham removed. Evidence has emerged suggesting that a German adventurer may have arrived there first. And a dispute has been grinding on over who owned the site when Bingham supposedly discovered it.

Scholarly circles in Peru have been abuzz with revisionist debate. Not only may Bingham not be quite the heroic pioneer that he has been portrayed as, but it may well be that the Lost City of the Incas was never really lost after all.

The disputes over who discovered or rediscovered the sacred site have become so contentious they have been living up to the phrase “the fights of Machu Picchu,” coined by U.S. writer Daniel Buck in an allusion to a Pablo Neruda ode, “Heights of Machu Picchu.”

No one in the field of Machu Picchu studies seriously challenges the fact that Bingham arrived at the jungle-shrouded ruins in 1911, excavated and photographed them, and largely introduced them to the world.

But his claims have been challenged over time.

“Hiram Bingham never thought someone would doggedly investigate his path,” said Mariana Mould de Pease, a Peruvian historian.

Soon after Bingham led his expeditions to Machu Picchu, claims surfaced that a British missionary, Thomas Payne, and a German engineer, J.M. von Hassel, had beaten him there. And maps found by historians show references to Machu Picchu as early as 1874.

The latest challenge comes from recently publicised claims raising the possibility that a German adventurer arrived at Machu Picchu and looted it decades before Bingham even set foot in Peru. Records show that the German, Augusto R. Berns, purchased land in the 1860s opposite the Machu Picchu mountain, built a sawmill on his property and then tried to raise money from investors to plunder nearby Incan ruins, all with the blessing of Peru’s government.

“The Berns information is a matter that has to be investigated further,” said Jorge Flores Ochoa, a prominent Peruvian anthropologist. “Hiram Bingham painted himself as a great explorer who ventured to the ends of the Earth, but that was a fantasy. The truth is that others, perhaps many others, arrived at Machu Picchu long before he did.”

Berns, an engineer, went to Peru to work on the Southern Peruvian Railway. An article this year in the magazine South American Explorer by Paolo Greer, an Alaska-based cartographer, offered additional detail about Berns, showing how he stopped cutting railroad ties on his property in the 1880s and started trying to lure investors into ventures for prospecting the area for gold and silver.

“Berns’ mining claims proved worthless,” Greer said in an e-mail message. “However, he spent years purposely searching for Inca sites, employing local guides who were intimate with the area.”

Moreover, some scholars say, Bingham may have known about Berns’ activities. Mould de Pease said she found in Yale’s own archives an 1887 Peruvian government document authorizing Berns to remove treasure from areas that may have included Machu Picchu. She reported the find in a 2003 book.

“If this document was in Bingham’s own papers, then he knew that Berns could have arrived there first,” she said.

Others scoff at the possibility that Berns set foot on Machu Picchu, pointing to discrepancies in the richly worded prospectuses that he sent out to investors. In one document, Berns referred to an “ancient gold-washing apparatus” called “llamajcansha,” which “in the ancient Indian languages, means ‘gold yard.’”

“It is unlikely that readers of his prospectus in the United States spoke Quechua,” Buckwrote in an essay published in the Lima newspaper La Republica, referring to the indigenous language spoken in this part of Peru. “Otherwise they would have figured out that llamajcansha meant ‘llama yard.’”

Buck added, “Berns was selling a load of llama dung.”

Sceptics also say no substantive proof has emerged that Berns ever spirited away artefacts from Machu Picchu.

Meanwhile, in an effort to assert greater control over its cultural heritage, Peru’s government said last month that it would take legal action against Yale in an effort to secure the return of thousands of artefacts Bingham took to the university. Peru claims the artefacts had been lent to Yale and therefore should have been returned. The threat of legal action is an abrupt turnaround from a recent preliminary understanding between Yale and Peru that appeared to put the parties on the road to resolving the dispute. Both sides in the case have seized on the revelations about Berns as supporting evidence. — New York Times News Service

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Mixed results from five States
Feeble response
Pakistan and the Lashkar’s jihad in India
Has the Kyoto protocol worked?
Planning for inclusive development
Who got to Machu Picchu first?
Corrections and clarifications
Welcome
U.S. pressure
Unsung heroes

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu