House of Lost Worlds by Richard Conniff

Author:Richard Conniff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

The overgrown ruins of Machu Picchu at the time of their 1911 rediscovery. Anthropologists now think the site was a country retreat, the Camp David of Incan emperors.

The farmers had burned away enough of the tangled overgrowth to make visible what Bingham described in a 1913 article for Harper’s as a “maze of small and large walls, the ruins of buildings made of blocks of white granite, most carefully cut and beautifully fitted together without cement.” They were arranged around an open plaza on a ridge connecting Huayna Picchu and Machu Picchu, with neat agricultural terraces marching up and down the slopes at either end. Bingham called them “as wonderful ruins as any ever found in Peru.”12 He seems, however, not to have recognized in 1911 just how wonderful they were. He took a few pictures on that first visit, prowled around the buildings, then turned around and headed back downhill, arriving in camp before dark, like any modern tourist.

The rest of his itinerary beckoned: just two weeks later he would locate the remains of Vitcos, the last holdout of the Incan emperors, an achievement almost on a par with finding Machu Picchu (though he did not recognize the significance of this discovery either). The expedition also needed to complete a survey of the 73rd meridian, roughly from Cuzco down to the Pacific Ocean, and of course Bingham meant to climb Coropuna. (Peck got there first, although Bingham seems to have climbed higher. It is doubtful that either of them reached the summit, which was not, in any case, the apex of the Americas.) The result was that Bingham himself did not bother to return to Machu Picchu that year, though he sent a two-man crew up to map what he described to his wife as “my new Inca City.” He thought the expedition’s greatest discovery was a site near Cuzco where he had found intermingled human and animal bones embedded in the exposed face of a hillside beneath seventy-five feet of gravel. Bingham theorized that his “Cuzco man” might indicate a much earlier human presence in the Americas than anyone had ever imagined.13

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