Christopher Heaney: Did Yale plunder Peru?
[Christopher Heaney is a writer and Fulbright Fellow to Peru.]
On July 24, 1911, a 35-year-old Yale lecturer named Hiram Bingham followed an eight-year-old boy into the Peruvian jungle. As director of the Yale Peruvian expedition of 1911, Bingham was looking for Vitcos, one of the last Incan capitals sacked by the Spanish in 1572; the boy, whose family lived and planted crops among Incan ruins, was his guide. Bingham--six-foot-four, handsome, and dressed in a hunting jacket and crumpled gray fedora--followed the child over cascading terraces and into a cave framed by sacred steps and a sinuous hourglass of cut stone. Above, a beautiful curving tower scraped the overcast sky. Beyond it was a clearing bound on two sides by temples, on the third by a view of a snow-capped peak, and on the fourth by the ridge that lent these ruins its name: Machu Picchu. The grandest of the temples had three walls of beautiful, cyclopean white granite and sat at an angle to an unfinished temple with three perfect trapezoidal windows.
Bingham knew that Machu Picchu was too close to Cuzco, the center of the Incan empire, and thus was not Vitcos. The romance of the ruins, however, struck him to the core. He spent five hours excitedly taking pictures of the Incas' ceremonial baths and vine-draped royal residences, of their spectacular mountain views, and of the boy next to a carved stone column--or Intihuatana--that had once been the Incas' hitching post for the sun, their god. He noted in his journal that a Peruvian had "discovered" the ruins in 1902, but Bingham was determined to return. "Would anyone believe what I had found?" he recalls himself musing, almost 40 years later, in his classic account of the expedition, The Lost City of the Incas.
The question was a masterful literary concoction. As Bingham well knew, everyone would believe his story. Bingham and his Yale expedition had come to Peru in the waning light of a golden age of American exploration, and, perhaps just as importantly, in the dawn of America's imperial century, when the country's soldiers, diplomats, businessmen, and scientists spilled into Latin America. What Bingham did next, on a subsequent expedition to Machu Picchu, was emblematic of that age: He unearthed thousands of artifacts--ranging from necklaces and bracelets to broken and delicate terra-cotta instruments and human remains--and shipped them back to the United States, to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. Today, these artifacts make up the only intact collection from an Incan royal estate that escaped the torches of Spanish conquest.
But the descendants of the Americas' largest pre-Columbian empire now want those artifacts back. A year ago, the government of Peru announced that it was prepared to sue Yale in court for the return of the "lost treasure" of Machu Picchu. Yale refused to return the collection, claiming it rightfully belonged to the university, although it did offer the compromise of returning some artifacts and funding a museum for their display. Peru rejected the offer and has yet to follow through with its threatened lawsuit, but, if it does, it will be in sensational company. This year, several countries have charged world-famous Western museums with illegitimately possessing native artifacts. In February, Italy successfully forced the Metropolitan Museum of Art to acknowledge that the Euphronios Krater was looted, and it prosecuted a former J. Paul Getty Museum director for accepting smuggled artifacts. That same month, Egypt's antiquities chief threatened the St. Louis Art Museum with legal action if it did not return a purportedly stolen 3,200-year-old mummy mask. In July, Greece also won the return of artifacts from the Getty, and, in September, a German university took the unprecedented step of returning a small piece of a Parthenon frieze. (The British Museum continues to stonewall Greek attempts to retrieve the larger Elgin marbles.) ...
Read entire article at New Republic
On July 24, 1911, a 35-year-old Yale lecturer named Hiram Bingham followed an eight-year-old boy into the Peruvian jungle. As director of the Yale Peruvian expedition of 1911, Bingham was looking for Vitcos, one of the last Incan capitals sacked by the Spanish in 1572; the boy, whose family lived and planted crops among Incan ruins, was his guide. Bingham--six-foot-four, handsome, and dressed in a hunting jacket and crumpled gray fedora--followed the child over cascading terraces and into a cave framed by sacred steps and a sinuous hourglass of cut stone. Above, a beautiful curving tower scraped the overcast sky. Beyond it was a clearing bound on two sides by temples, on the third by a view of a snow-capped peak, and on the fourth by the ridge that lent these ruins its name: Machu Picchu. The grandest of the temples had three walls of beautiful, cyclopean white granite and sat at an angle to an unfinished temple with three perfect trapezoidal windows.
Bingham knew that Machu Picchu was too close to Cuzco, the center of the Incan empire, and thus was not Vitcos. The romance of the ruins, however, struck him to the core. He spent five hours excitedly taking pictures of the Incas' ceremonial baths and vine-draped royal residences, of their spectacular mountain views, and of the boy next to a carved stone column--or Intihuatana--that had once been the Incas' hitching post for the sun, their god. He noted in his journal that a Peruvian had "discovered" the ruins in 1902, but Bingham was determined to return. "Would anyone believe what I had found?" he recalls himself musing, almost 40 years later, in his classic account of the expedition, The Lost City of the Incas.
The question was a masterful literary concoction. As Bingham well knew, everyone would believe his story. Bingham and his Yale expedition had come to Peru in the waning light of a golden age of American exploration, and, perhaps just as importantly, in the dawn of America's imperial century, when the country's soldiers, diplomats, businessmen, and scientists spilled into Latin America. What Bingham did next, on a subsequent expedition to Machu Picchu, was emblematic of that age: He unearthed thousands of artifacts--ranging from necklaces and bracelets to broken and delicate terra-cotta instruments and human remains--and shipped them back to the United States, to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. Today, these artifacts make up the only intact collection from an Incan royal estate that escaped the torches of Spanish conquest.
But the descendants of the Americas' largest pre-Columbian empire now want those artifacts back. A year ago, the government of Peru announced that it was prepared to sue Yale in court for the return of the "lost treasure" of Machu Picchu. Yale refused to return the collection, claiming it rightfully belonged to the university, although it did offer the compromise of returning some artifacts and funding a museum for their display. Peru rejected the offer and has yet to follow through with its threatened lawsuit, but, if it does, it will be in sensational company. This year, several countries have charged world-famous Western museums with illegitimately possessing native artifacts. In February, Italy successfully forced the Metropolitan Museum of Art to acknowledge that the Euphronios Krater was looted, and it prosecuted a former J. Paul Getty Museum director for accepting smuggled artifacts. That same month, Egypt's antiquities chief threatened the St. Louis Art Museum with legal action if it did not return a purportedly stolen 3,200-year-old mummy mask. In July, Greece also won the return of artifacts from the Getty, and, in September, a German university took the unprecedented step of returning a small piece of a Parthenon frieze. (The British Museum continues to stonewall Greek attempts to retrieve the larger Elgin marbles.) ...