Call Him Andean Jones

George Lucas won't tell us if he based Indiana Jones on Hiram Bingham III, the swashbuckling, fedora-topped explorer who in 1911 (re)discovered Machu Picchu, an Inca citadel in Peru. But it is hard to find anyone other than Bingham who would make a more suitable model.


National Geographic

Hiram Bingham III in 1912, on an artifact-gathering trip to Machu Picchu the year after the American explorer found the ruins of the Inca fortress in Peru.
.The grandson and son of Protestant missionaries, Bingham broke out of his Puritan constraints to became a professor, explorer, photographer, writer, World War I pilot and U.S. senator. His character was so complex that not even his closest family members felt that they fully understood him. Referring to Bingham's marriage to Alfreda Mitchell, an heiress to the Tiffany jewelry fortune, his son wrote that one "never could be sure how much his love forAlfredawas for herself and how much for her family's money." Nakedly ambitious, Bingham was a man of his age—an era when fortune-hunters ventured into remote parts of the world in search of "lost cities" and when the U.S. was making ever more inroads into Latin America.

Hiram Bingham and the Machu Picchu saga deserve no less than "Cradle of Gold," Christopher Heaney's thorough, engrossing portrait of a mercurial figure at a crucial juncture of his life. In the end, Mr. Heaney pronounces harsh judgments on Bingham's very real flaws—the author, for one thing, sides with detractors who regard Bingham as a terrible archaeologist, even if he was an effective publicist for the profession. But it is a tribute to Mr. Heaney's sense of fairness that different conclusions can be reached through a careful weighing of the material he presents.

Bingham made a total of five expeditions to Latin America. The objective of the third and most important trip was to find Peru's lost Inca city of Vilcabamba. Its existence— along with that of another town, Vitcos—was mentioned by 16th-century Spanish chroniclers. Vilcabamba and Vitcos, in the eastern foothills of the Peruvian Andes, were once part of an empire that stretched as far as Colombia, Chile and northern Argentina. But Inca power, already weakened by political infighting during the 16th century, was no match for the Spanish conquistadores. The beleaguered Incas sought refuge in the forested towns of Vilcabamba and Vitcos.

In the centuries that followed, haciendas and the infamous rubber trade spread across the Cuzco region where Vilcabamba and Vitcos had once hosted the remnants of the Inca empire. The Peruvian state had scant presence there. The few natives who lived near the Inca ruins were not aware of their historical importance. Then, in 1911, Hiram Bingham—a tall, handsome, world-traveling Yale University history lecturer—made his foray in search of Vilcabamba. He embarked on the trip with the backing of Yale, private companies, a few friends and even President William Howard Taft, a fellow Yalie, who assigned a government topographer to accompany the expedition.

When he arrived again in the region, Bingham gathered tips and local lore from a German prospector, a local prefect and others and then set off into the foothills above the jungle. He encountered a Peruvian who suggested that he investigate a ridge leading to a mountain in the distance. Guided by the young son of a local farmer, Bingham climbed to the ridge-top and found, as he later wrote, "a jungle-covered 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. Surprise followed surprise until there came the realization that we were in the midst of as wonderful ruins as any ever found in Peru."

The peak near the site was called Machu Picchu ("Old Mountain" in the Indians' Quechua language), and so the name was applied to Bingham's extraordinary find. The expedition pushed on the next day as Bingham continued his quest to find Vitcos and Vilcabamba. Several days later Bingham came across hilltop ruins that he recognized as Vitcos. The site was less spectacular than Machu Picchu, but its discovery confirmed the accuracy of the 16th-century Spanish records. "By marrying the historian's archival tools to the explorer's compass and his own magnificent enthusiasm," Mr. Heaney writes, "Bingham had proved that the chronicles could be trusted, and that Inca history was real, not the stuff of myth."


Axiom Photographic Agency/Getty Images

Machu Picchu
.The uncovering of Vitcos encouraged Bingham to keep on looking for Vilcabamba. He traversed a jungle area peopled by the Machiguenga and Asháninka tribes, eventually finding more ruins—but they did not appear promising, and Bingham failed to take them for what they were: Vilcabamba.

The American was initially celebrated in Peru for helping to resurrect Inca history—but the good feelings did not last long. On an expedition in 1912 funded by Yale and National Geographic magazine, Bingham set out to collect Inca artifacts and bring them back to America. Successfully eluding a Peruvian government monitor and resentful locals, his team amassed 5,415 pieces, including human bones, from Machu Picchu and Vitcos. But the price for Bingham's reputation was heavy: He became a pariah in Peru, a country he professed to love, and he was excoriated by his peers for his hasty, haphazard collecting.

Bingham would hide some of the treasure for years because he hadn't obtained Peru's permission to export it, and even the objects he legally sent home to Yale would prove hard to classify because they had been jumbled together and arrived with little information from the site. Yet Bingham gained widespread fame for his Machu Picchu discovery, which he recounted with photographs and articles in National Geographic and in books, including a "runaway best seller" published in 1948, "Lost City of the Incas."

The battle over ownership of the materials Bingham collected has lasted nearly a century, and Mr. Heaney devotes the latter part of his account to the battle's details. At the time of Bingham's expeditions, Peruvian laws covering artifact-collecting were murky. He negotiated complex deals with the government and with land owners, and he made promises to return the artifacts and bones; but he didn't inform Yale of some of his arrangements. Even now a lawsuit is wending its way through a Connecticut court as Peru attempts to force Yale to give up the Bingham material held by the university's Peabody Museum of Natural History. The suit comes at a time when there is increasing pressure on former colonial powers to repatriate historically significant holdings taken from other lands. Some governments, including the U.S., have cooperated with the affected countries. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles have returned artifacts.

Absent from the discussion, however, are the rights of those who own the land on which the discoveries were made or of their ancestors, who may have owned the land lawfully and had it expropriated by their own governments. Very little effort has been given to sorting out the confusing laws prevailing at the time of most long-ago excavations—laws that, in the case of Bingham, were not credibly enforced in any case.

There is little doubt that Bingham bent the rules. But Peru also bore much blame. During the 1912 expedition that produced the bulk of Bingham's collection, the monitor appointed by the government did a dismal job. The monitor's final inventory has never been found, so we don't know what Bingham was cleared to collect. That the material was easily exported required an authorization that the Peruvian government actually gave, despite protests from members of a burgeoning movement to protect the country's cultural heritage. Still, Peru's actions do not excuse Bingham for hiding from his American sponsors his obligation to return much of what he had carted away should the Peruvian government want the pieces back.

.Cradle of Gold
By Christopher Heaney
Palgrave Macmillan, 285 pages, $27

Read an excerpt
.Mr. Heaney praises Bingham for opening up the entire field of Inca studies but otherwise seems to find little to admire in the man. He deplores Bingham's plundering of the ruins, but that's just one of several indictments. Mr. Heaney also chastises Bingham for not recognizing Vilcabamba and instead calling the site Espiritu Pampa. The attack is lame: Espíritu Pampa was confirmed to be Vilcabamba only much later, in the 1960s. Bingham also comes under attack for pumping up Machu Picchu as the "lost city" of the Incas. Maybe Machu Picchu isn't as important as Vilcabamba, but it was certainly a magnificent citadel, an architectural treasure that—aside from a few rumors, a couple of references in obscure maps and perhaps a visit by one or two foreigners over the centuries—was indeed "lost." It was not even mentioned in the Spanish chronicles.

'Cradle of Gold" argues that Bingham, in early accounts of his expeditions, shamefully played down the assistance he received from Peruvians and failed to give sufficient credit to the research on the Incas that had already been done by scholars within the country. The criticism is well-founded—but Bingham corrected some of those omissions in "Lost City of the Incas." Mr. Heaney also criticizes him for using "forced Indian labor." Bingham did indeed operate as something of an autocrat, particularly when recruiting natives who were reluctant to go rooting around in what they regarded as sacred places. But often the Indians willingly set aside their qualms if the money was right.

Mr. Heaney even seems put off by Bingham´s flamboyance, by his ability to reinvent himself as a pilot and a politician after his relationship with Peru soured and his sloppiness as a self-taught archaeologist was exposed. With America on the cusp of entering World War I in 1917, Bingham enrolled in a flying school—partly out of a patriotic spirit but partly, Mr. Heaney says, out of a need for personal grandeur. "Flight reflected the guiding premise of his life: to escape and soar above the crowd." In 1922, Bingham was elected lieutenant governor of Connecticut; two years later he ran for governor, won that race, but then a short time later also won a special election for an open seat in the U.S. Senate. Mr. Heaney says that Bingham "landed in Washington with a splash," wearing "Tiffany-bought finery"—at that point he had been married to Alfreda for more than two decades—and arranging "fabulous photo ops." Bingham once arrived at a committee meeting, we learn, "by landing a blimp on the steps of the Capitol."

As a spouse, a friend and a colleague, Bingham must have been insufferable. He showed little care for his wife, he hogged credit and tended to correct people's pronunciation of foreign words. But his revelation of Machu Picchu's existence has been a cultural and economic blessing for countless Peruvians over the years. The site is "a great engine of identity and prosperity for Cuzco," Mr. Heaney concedes. More than 800,000 tourists visit every year. "Where the family of Bingham's young guide once lived, there is now an $800-a-night hotel." And a luxury train now runs between the city of Cuzco and the town below Machu Picchu. The name of the train? The Hiram Bingham.