Noteworthy
Hiram_Bingham III in 1916
1911 -
HIRAM BINGHAM III "re-discovers"
Machu Picchu “Lost” City of the Incas". Whoever left their intricately
stone carved city of about 1,000 at 11,000 feet above the Urubamba
River, please use the White Courtesy telephone.
Bingham is
credited with becoming the first outsider, in 1911, to visit the ruins
of Machu Picchu, the now-famous Inca settlement in the Peruvian Andes
that was built in the 15th century and abandoned around the time of the
Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire in the 16th century. Born in 1875 to
Christian missionaries in Hawaii, Bingham earned a Ph.D. from Harvard
and married a Tiffany & Co. heiress, whose wealth helped fund his
expeditions. In 1911, Bingham, then a Yale University faculty member
specializing in South American history, was in Peru searching for
Vilcabamba, the last Inca outpost before it fell to the Spanish, when he
encountered a local farmer who directed him to the ruins of Machu
Picchu. Although the site was known to peasants living in the region,
its existence had never been publicized. Bingham, who returned to Machu
Picchu (meaning “old peak” in Quechua, one of Peru’s native languages)
in 1912 to conduct a major excavation and made a third visit to the area
in 1914-15, documented his sensational findings in a series of articles
and books. Although some experts later contended that missionaries and
other non-locals might have visited Machu Picchu before Bingham, he was
the first to conduct a scientific exploration of the site.
In addition to
his days as an explorer, Bingham commanded a flight school in France for
the American military during World War I then went on to represent
Connecticut in the U.S. Senate from 1925 to 1933. He died in 1956. In
2010, after a lengthy custody dispute, Yale University reached an
agreement with the Peruvian government to return thousands of artifacts
Bingham had excavated from Machu Picchu.
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