• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The final load-bearing beam of Bingham’s Vilcabamba theory collapsed when John Verano, a physical anthropologist at Tulane University, reexamined the bones that had been exhumed in 1912. Contrary to Yale’s original findings, the ratio of men to women was roughly even, and many of the female skeletons showed evidence of childbirth. Thus the mythical Virgins of the Sun vanished once again, this time probably for good.

As for Bingham’s Tampu Tocco theory, it relied on the assumption that Machu Picchu had been constructed by the Incas’ predecessors, perhaps a thousand years before Pizarro’s arrival. Further excavations and comparisons to other masterpieces of Inca architecture indicate that a more probable date for its construction was around 1450. Such a date would place its founding squarely in Pachacutec’s reign. Most experts now agree that the likeliest location of Tampu Tocco is Pacaritambo, the spot near Cusco that Bingham had been keen on visiting in 1915 before his expedition imploded. The evidence here is thinner than it is for Vilcabamba. John Leivers told me he’d visited Pacaritambo but didn’t see any proof that it had been Tampu Tocco. Locals who lived in the vicinity told him that they knew of no cave nearby.

The artifacts that Bingham had sent back from Machu Picchu in 1912 sat gathering dust in the Peabody Museum until 1981, when the Andean specialists Richard Burger and Lucy Salazar arrived at Yale. The pair thoroughly reexamined the Bingham collection and, largely based on that research, decided that Machu Picchu, “far from being the Inca birthplace, was merely one of a number of personal royal estates built by an Inca king in the remote countryside,” Salazar later wrote. Burger has described the site more succinctly: “It was Pachacutec’s Camp David.” As for all the temples and such, that stuff just came with the job. “The Inca was considered descended from the sun, so there would have to be a religious component,” Burger told Time magazine. “But the Incas probably spent just as much time hunting or drinking corn beer on the plaza.” From Bingham’s lofty romantic vision of Vilcabamba, Machu Picchu had now sunk to the level of a sportsman’s lodge, the lost tap room of the Incas.

Even before the controversies sent Bingham’s reputation as a hero into steep decline, his role as America’s greatest swashbuckling explorer had been superseded by an even more indelible adventurer: Indiana Jones. There have been any number of attempts to prove that Bingham’s life was the source material for the movie hero: both are university professors who dabble in archaeology, both search the blank spots of the map, looking for important relics, both wear fedoras. The opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which Indy outruns a gigantic rolling boulder, takes place in a part of Peru that looks like it could be within walking distance of Machu Picchu.

The most direct connection between Indy and Bingham is a 1954 B-movie titled Secret of the Incas. The movie features two good-looking stars: Charlton Heston, who plays Harry Steele, a hard-boiled treasure hunter based out of Cusco; and Machu Picchu, playing itself. Deborah Nadoolman Landis, who designed the costumes for Raiders, has said that she and her team watched Secret of the Incas multiple times and based Indy’s look on Harry Steele’s; both treasure hunters have a weakness for earth tones, leather jackets and, of course, fedoras. The most obvious connection between the two films, however, is Raiders’ famous map-room scene, in which Indy holds the staff of Ra and catches a beam of sunlight to reveal the location of the Ark of the Covenant on a scale model of the lost city of Tanis. In Secret, Steele consults a tabletop reproduction of Machu Picchu—for which, much like Indiana Jones, he happens to possess the key missing piece—then employs an ancient Inca reflector to direct a shaft of light to the spot where the coveted golden sunburst is hidden.

The link from Indy to