Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [70]
Being far off the tourism path, Paul and Javier were left alone to excavate, and they were pulling some extraordinary relics out of the ground. As we walked to the site’s sun temple, Paul told me about some ceramics that they had found that seemed to tell the history of Manco Inca. “There are pictographs all around the outside,” he said. “Sort of like hieroglyphics.”
This seemed a little far-fetched. After all, if such a pot were found at Machu Picchu, the discovery would be broadcast around the globe; National Geographic would dispatch a video crew, and Peru’s president would appear on TV crowing about this fine example of his country’s proud patrimony. (John had taken part in a minor discovery near Machu Picchu a few years back that had generated a flurry of hyperbolic international media coverage.) But archaeologists are just starting to scratch the surface—literally—at Espiritu Pampa. As we stood just below a spot where Bingham once posed for a famous photograph in his fedora, standing rakishly over an Inca doorway, the camp’s intern/ cook/factotum, a teenager named Roni, leaned over and picked up a piece of ceramic—a pot handle shaped like a puma’s head. Beneath our feet were piles of red tiles just like the ones that baffled Bingham. Paul and Javier’s team had found intact roofing tiles, hand-painted with symbols. “They are so beautiful,” Paul said, holding his hand over his heart.
“Could we see them?” I asked.
“Are you serious? I thought you’d never ask,” Javier said.
We walked back to the compound, exchanged greetings and friendly insults with the potsherd scrubbers, and entered a dark, barnlike building. We sat down on benches at a handmade table near a wedge of sunlight that peeked through the open door. Roni served sweet, milky punch in metal cups. Javier ducked under a plastic tarp and started to pull out items. The first piece was a giant roof tile with three serpents painted onto it. He and Paul shouted simultaneously, “Amaru!”—Quechua for “snake.” “The serpents symbolize the Pachamama,” Paul explained. Javier showed off some burned corncobs, possibly leftovers from a four-hundred-year-old dinner. A small pot in the shape of a soup tureen looked like it could have been purchased at Crate and Barrel. Finally, Javier pulled out the Manco Inca pot, which had been glued back together.
“Here, hold it,” Javier said, passing the ceramic to John so that he could trace the illustrations that circled its perimeter. “Look, there are the local natives, there’s a serpent, there’s a Spanish horse. This piece is totally unique. There’s nothing like it anywhere else.”
The pot was mesmerizing, quite possibly a direct link to Manco himself. At that very moment, Peru and Yale were gearing up for a custody battle over relics that Bingham brought back from Machu Picchu. I’d been to Yale’s Peabody Museum and had come away confused; press reports in Lima about the Yale versus Peru controversy had made it seem like Bingham had run off with King Tut’s treasure, but nothing at Yale was half as interesting as what John held in his hands.
“Do you know that what you’ve got here is more impressive than anything Bingham found at Machu Picchu?” I said to the INC men across the table. Javier looked at Paul, then back at me.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. Neither he nor Paul could imagine that anything their humble digging had found could compare to the ancient wonders that Bingham was assumed to have unearthed.
In the morning, John, Justo and I made a circuit of the main ruins. Even as a ghost town, Espiritu Pampa keeps growing. Javier had told us that a few years ago archaeologists