Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [93]
When Bingham’s team arrived in the Andes, a close examination of the bones was made almost immediately. Eaton reviewed some animal remains found in the deposit, which Bingham had excitedly hypothesized were those of a long-extinct bison hunted by the Cusco Man. After a reconnaissance mission to a local butcher shop, Eaton decided that they were actually the bones of a modern domestic cow. The finding negated Bingham’s theory that humans might have inhabited South America going back to the Ice Age. He wired his editors at Harper’s, pleading with them to kill a suddenly obsolete article he’d written about the bones’ likely historical importance. It was the first sign that 1912 wasn’t going to be a replay of 1911.
Bad news continued to pile up. The native laborers Bingham conscripted were unenthusiastic about clearing the ruins at Machu Picchu, which had vanished again under tropical foliage in less than a year. One of Bingham’s key assistants lost his footing while climbing Huayna Picchu and nearly plummeted two thousand feet to his death; he was falling toward the Urubamba River when he grabbed a mesquite bush, almost tearing his right arm off. A week of “back breaking” digging at the Principal Temple yielded nothing, Bingham wrote. “Not even a bone or potsherd.” The dearth of discoveries, plus ample evidence of looting, made it clear that Yale’s was not the first expedition to search for whatever had been buried at the abandoned city. A 50-cent reward that Bingham offered to “any workman who would report the whereabouts of a cave containing a skull, and who would leave the cave exactly as he had found it” spurred the quick discovery of dozens of graves. Most were located by Alvarez and Richarte, two of the Machu Picchu farmers who had welcomed Bingham to their mountaintop the previous year. When Alvarez disappeared for a few days, though, osteologist Eaton was told by another laborer that “Alvarez’s trouble is in his testes, and that the other Indians say the trouble has been inflicted by the spirits of the dead Incas whose graves Alvarez was robbing.” Then Richarte vanished, too. “Perhaps they really are afraid of the spirits,” Eaton wrote in his journal.
Bingham left the excavation of Machu Picchu under Eaton’s supervision and went off in pursuit of new discoveries in the nearby cloud forest. When he paid a return visit to the nearby hacienda Huadquiña, the son-in-law of the proprietress, an “enthusiastic amateur archaeologist” named Tomás Alvistur, delighted Bingham with a report that “some of the Indians on the plantation knew of three localities where there were Inca ruins, so they said, that had not been visited by white men.” These “feudal tenants,” as Bingham called the Huadquiña laborers, had zero interest in leading Bingham to these sites. As their overlord, Alvistur gave them no choice.
The first site the team encountered after climbing five thousand feet was Llactapata. Bingham hastily measured and photographed what he called the “relatively unimportant” ruins, pausing just long enough to wonder “what connection the people who built and occupied this mountain stronghold had to the other occupants of the valley”—the residents of Machu Picchu. Bingham pressed on through a second unpleasant day, at the end of which the explorer was shown another site, known as Palcay. There, in the middle of the night, the Huadquiña workers deserted. The discoverer of Machu Picchu needed a young boy who lived in a hut near the ruins to guide him back to the nearest town.
Bingham’s sophomore slump continued. Vitcos, the most promising site he had found aside from Machu Picchu, had been picked clean long before he arrived in 1911. “The existence of scattered