Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [102]
“Somebody is going to solve the mystery connected with these ancient peoples,” Gilbert Grosvenor wrote to Bingham in early 1914. “Let us get there first.”
Bingham’s competitive fires didn’t need much stoking. He was already planning his largest and most expensive expedition yet, one that would take two years to complete—one year of preparatory work by underlings and another of fieldwork under his supervision. In February, his chief Peruvian nemesis, President Guillermo Billinghurst, had been deposed, exiled and replaced by a military junta. Bingham dispatched an advance party to establish a new headquarters at Ollantaytambo, which was given the faux-Quechua name Yankihausi, or House of the Yankees. From this base they could continue mapping the region around Machu Picchu. Bingham planned to follow in 1915.
The official handbook that Bingham assembled for the Peruvian Expedition of 1914–15, under the Auspices of the National Geographic Society and Yale University, was his masterpiece of micromanagement. Almost every conceivable subject and contingency was covered, from “Care of Rifles” to “Treatment of Snakebite” to “Instructions for the Care and Selection of Mules.” (“Avoid mules with extra long heads, also those with hollow or dish faces.”) Considering the level of detail that Bingham was willing to go into regarding minutiae, his plans for 1915 seemed uncharacteristically scattered. Whereas in past years Bingham had been diligent in drawing up bullet-pointed lists of objectives, he described the goals of the new expedition in vague, grandiose terms. As Bingham was departing, the Hartford Courant explained that his expedition’s mission was to “complete the work of uncovering the mysteries of Inca civilization.”
A handwritten to-do list that Bingham scribbled inside his own copy of the 1914–15 handbook indicates that the one unifying thread of his plans was his desire to prove once and for all his theories of why Machu Picchu had been built. Under the heading “Must Be Done,” Bingham’s top priority was to examine Pacaritambo, a site near Cusco that was generally agreed to be the location of Tampu Tocco, the three-windowed hill believed to be the fountainhead of the Inca dynasty.
In the February 1915 issue of National Geographic, published just before Bingham departed for Peru, the explorer made clear that he was no longer suggesting that Machu Picchu might be Tampu Tocco, the birthplace of the Inca civilization; he was all but convinced of it. Bingham’s growing certainty relied on a somewhat shaky foundation, a history of the Incas published in 1642 by a priest named Fernando de Montesinos.12
Bingham’s argument boiled down to this: The first Incas, because of their small army (Montesinos estimated their number at five hundred), would have needed to live in a place with excellent natural defenses. Machu Picchu was, of course, almost inaccessible. Montesinos reported that one of the early Inca rulers banned the use of writing. Bingham thought that enigmatic stones with rounded edges (sort of like poker chips) that had been excavated at Machu Picchu in 1912 might have been used for record keeping in the place of letters.13 Tampu Tocco was believed to have contained a wall with three windows—just like the Temple of the Three Windows at Machu Picchu—and to have been situated near a cave. “It is well to remember that there is no cave, large or small, at Pacaritambo,” Bingham wrote. “At Machu Picchu there are several large caves, one of them lined with very beautiful masonry.” In other words, the Royal Mausoleum beneath the Torreon was the holiest spot in Tampu Tocco—the very place from which the founding Incas had emerged.
It was a pretty far-out argument, even for a man described