Foda De Una Empresa

Machu Picchu's Mysteries Continue to Lure Explorers

By Kelly Hearn and Jason Golomb

On the morning of July 24, 1911, a tall lecturer-cum-explorer from Yale University set off in a cold drizzle to investigate rumors of ancient Inca ruins in Peru. The explorer chopped his way through thick jungle, crawled across a "bridge" of slender logs bound together with vines, and crept throughunderbrush hiding venomous fer-de-lance pit vipers.
Two hours into the hike, the explorer and his two escorts came across a grass-covered hut. A pair of Indian farmers walked them a short way before handing them over to a small Indian boy. With the boy leading the way, Hiram Bingham stumbled upon one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century—and what was named in 2007 as one of the newseven wonders of the world: Machu Picchu.
What Bingham saw was a dramatic and towering citadel of stone cut from escarpments. Fashioned by men without mortar, the stones fit so tightly together that not even a knife's blade could fit between them. He wondered: Why? By whom? For what?
Certainly, what he saw was awe-invoking. Contemporary Peruvian expert Luis Lumbreras, the former director of Peru'sNational Institute of Culture, describes "a citadel made up of palaces and temples, dwellings and storehouses," a site fulfilling ceremonial religious functions.
Machu Picchu is formed of buildings, plazas, and platforms connected by narrow lanes or paths. One sector is cordoned off to itself by walls, ditches, and, perhaps, a moat—built, writes Lumbreras, "not as part of a military fortification[but] rather as a form of restricted ceremonial isolation."
The Wrong "Lost City"
Bingham's discovery was published in the April 1913 issue of National Geographic magazine, bringing the mountaintop citadel to the world's attention. (The National Geographic Society helped fund Bingham on excursions to Machu Picchu in 1912 and 1915.)
Bingham believed he had found Vilcabamba, the so-called LostCity of the Inca where the last of the independent Inca rulers waged a years-long battle against Spanish conquistadors. Bingham argued for and justified his conclusions for almost 50 years after his discovery, and his explanations were widely accepted.
What Bingham had found, however, was not the lost city, but a lost city.
In 1964, adventurer Gene Savoy identified ruins and proved that EspirituPampa (in the Vilcabamba region of Peru, west of Machu Picchu) was the lost city that Bingham had originally sought. Ironically, Bingham had actually discovered these ruins at Espiritu Pampa during his 1911 trek. He uncovered a few Inca-carved stone walls and bridges but dismissed the ruins and ultimately focused on Machu Picchu. Savoy uncovered much of the rest.
So what then was this city thatBingham had revealed? There were no accounts of Machu Picchu in any of the much-studied chronicles of the Spanish invasion and occupation. There was nothing to document that it even existed at all, let alone its purpose.
Bingham theorized that Machu Picchu had served as a convent of sorts where chosen women from the Inca realm were trained to serve the Inca leader and his coterie. He found morethan a hundred skeletons at the site and believed that roughly 75 percent of the skeletons were female, but modern studies have shown a more reasonable fifty-fifty split between male and female bones.
Bingham also believed that Machu Picchu was the mythical Tampu-tocco, the birthplace of the Inca forefathers.
Modern Theories
Modern research has continued to modify, correct, and mold the legend ofMachu Picchu. Research conducted by John Rowe, Richard Burger, and Lucy Salazar-Burger indicates that rather than being a defensive stronghold, Machu Picchu was a retreat built by and for the Inca ruler Pachacuti. Burger has suggested it was built for elites wanting to escape the noise and congestion of the city.
Brian Bauer, an expert in Andean civilization at the University of Illinois at...