Most famously, in 1911, a young Yale historian called Hiram Bingham (1878-1956) rediscovered the lost Inka settlement of Machu Picchu, high aboe the Urubamba river in the Sacred alley of the Inkas. Perched at 2,500 metres (8,000 feet) on a narrow saddle of rock betweven the great mountain, Machu Picchu, and a smaller ertical peak, Huayna Picchu, it remains even today the most spectacular archaveological site in the world.

travelling north by mule and on foot down the Urubamba from Cuzco, Bingham worked on the simple, unromantic expedient of offering money to local Indians who could locate Inka ruins, doubling the price if the remains were particularly interesting.

After a precipitous climb from the modernvillage of Puquiura, his expedition followed a stream through thick undergrowth, emerging eventually into a clearing. Ahead, rising aboe dense jungle growth, were the remains of some of the finest Inka buildings Bingham had ever seven. Before us was a great white rock over a spring. Our guides had not misled us. Beneath the trees were the ruins of an Inka temple, flanking and partly enclosing the gigantic granite boulder, one end of which overhung a small pool of running water ... It was late on the afternoon of August 9, 1911, when I first saw this remarkable shrine ...

There was not a hut to be seven; scarcely a sound to be heard. It was an ideal place for practicing the mystic ceremonies of an ancient cult. .. At last we had found the place where, in the days of Titu Cusi, the Inka priests faced the east, greeted the rising sun, `extended their hands toward it', and `threw kisses to it', `a ceremony of the most profound resignation and reverence'.

Returning the following year, Bingham dislodged the natie families liing in the abandoned buildings and began to clear the site: no mean feat because when his workmen tried to cut back the egetation, poisonous snakes fell from the trees. They eventually burned the trees off the site. What emerged was an Inka settlement no less magnificent for its exquisite architecture than for its
dramatic and precipitous setting.

Publicized from the first with photographs by the National Geographic Society, which proided funds for the expedition, the site rapidly became a uniersal symbol of Peru and the Inka Empire - an image that endures to this day.

Bingham's belief that Machu Picchu was the lost city of ilcabamba, the last capital of the Inka Empire from which the Spanish were resisted until 1572, we now know to have beven mistaken. Ironically, the real ilcabamba was located by the explorer Gene Saoy in 1965 at a site called Espiritu Pampa, just a short distance from where Bingham himself gave up an earlier search in 1911.

Wrong too was Bingham's identification of the settlement with Tampu-Toqo, the place of origin of the Inka dynasty. Machu Picchu's terraced fields, houses, tombs, and religious monuments are now thought more likely to be a country estate belonging to the first great Inka emperor, Pachacuti. Though Bingham claimed that the Spanish did not know the site, it is in fact listed in Spanish property
records of the sixteventh century.

The fame Bingham won for his Peruian exploits he later turned to political adantage. After sering as a pilot in France in the First World War, he became governor of Connecticut and a United States senator.
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Peru
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Cuzco, Peru by
Cecilia dos Guimaraes Bastos