Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [92]
At Yale, where the pioneering paleontologist Othniel Marsh had encouraged a wealthy uncle to fund the Peabody Museum, there was great hope that the hastily arranged “Peruvian Expedition of 1912, Under the Auspices of Yale University and the National Geographic Society” would provide such artifacts. If Machu Picchu had really eluded the Spaniards and vanished into the jungle since the sixteenth century, there was no telling what archaeological treasures might be hiding beneath its granite temples. “We all hope that you will be able to excavate and bring back a shipload of antiquities for your museum at Yale,” Grosvenor wrote to his new contributor.
Grosvenor’s cheerleading, unthinkable today, would have seemed unremarkable at the time. Peru’s artifacts had been shipped out of the country with few restrictions since Francisco Pizarro’s ransom deal with Atahualpa. By the early twentieth century, American museums were among the world’s most eager customers for pre-Columbian treasures. One New York newspaper reporter, receiving a tour of a new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History’s Peruvian Hall in 1906, observed merrily that the “choice personal ornaments of gold and silver, rich garments, pottery, etc.,” on display “were wrested mainly from ancient burial sites.”
As the 1912 expedition came together, however, attitudes in Peru toward its national heritage were changing almost week to week. Bingham’s very public search for Manco Inca’s lost capital had mobilized Peruvian intellectuals, who were fighting to preserve their country’s indigenous treasures. Within days of his 1911 visit to Machu Picchu, Bingham had received word from the prefect of the Cusco region that he was forbidden to undertake any excavations, a warning that Bingham brushed off because he wasn’t planning to do any digging. (An indication of how fast the atmosphere was changing in Peru: the order came from J. J. Nuñez, the same official who had invited Bingham to Choquequirao two years earlier to observe the treasure hunting that Nuñez had undertaken with explosives.) A second, stronger governmental decree was issued from Lima as Bingham returned from Espiritu Pampa. The exportation of artifacts from Peru without official consent was now “absolutely prohibited.”
As he hurried to assemble the 1912 expedition, Bingham reached out once again to President Taft, asking if the White House might help convince President Leguia to grant an exception to Yale, allowing Bingham to excavate and bring the Peabody Museum whatever artifacts he found. Taft was happy to oblige, and a deal was quickly negotiated. Bingham would receive a concession to dig, and he would split any unearthed antiquities fifty-fifty with Peru. From his half, Bingham also agreed to turn over one third of any “treasures, monuments and whatever other riches that might be found” to the owner of the land on which Machu Picchu sat.
Bingham’s desire to prove that the bones he found near Cusco were those of a prehistoric man was so well known that it had become fodder for jokes. “Prof. Bingham might be better engaged if he started out to find the prehistoric woman instead of the prehistoric man,” wrote one popular gazette. “We do not believe that the prehistoric woman belonged to a woman’s club, although she may have wielded one in the interests of the family.” To Bingham, confirming the age of the Cusco Man (as some were calling the glacial bones) was serious enough that he arranged to bring George Eaton, the Peabody’s curator of osteology, on the expedition. Preliminary estimates had ranged from ten thousand to fifty thousand years. Determining when, exactly, humans had migrated to the Western Hemisphere was one of the most hotly debated topics in the