Peruvian prez to Yale: return Machu Picchu ‘loot’

Yale should return its cache of Machu Picchu artifacts by next July or be considered “guilty of robbery,” declares Peru’s president, Alan Garcia.

Next July 7 marks the 100th anniversary of when Yale archeologist Hiram Bingham ’98 rediscovered the Incan ruins on a remote mountaintop. After excavating, Bingham brought ancient treasures to New Haven, where they’re housed at Yale’s Peabody Museum. Long-running negotiations for their return resulted in a memorandum of understanding three years ago but then collapsed. Peru filed suit in 2008.

“Either we come to an understanding,” Garcia told reporters in Peru, “or we’ll simply have to describe them as looters of treasures. . . . Now is the time to start packing up the things and send them over together with the research. Silence would indicate that they are guilty of robbery.”

For Peru’s centennial celebration, Garcia adds, “we don’t want a half-Machu Picchu, we don’t want a Machu Picchu piece by piece, we want a Machu Picchu with everything it had on July 7, 1910.”

Yale spokesmen couldn’t immediately be reached for a response. In the past, the university has said it is “disappointed” that Peru “rejected Yale’s offers to negotiate a collaborative agreement and instead decided to sue the university to recover archaeological material legally excavated at Machu Picchu.”