On July 24, 1911, an American scholar named Hiram Bingham III reached a mountain ridge in the Cusco region, guided by a local farmer named Melchor Arteaga, who agreed to show him some ruins that he and the local peasants had always known about in exchange for a few coins. What Bingham found that morning changed his life, sparked one of the longest archaeological controversies in South American history, and turned Machu Picchu into the most famous archaeological site in the world. But the story of that discovery is far more complex than the simplified version that appears in textbooks.
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Who was Hiram Bingham?
Hiram Bingham III was born in 1875 in Honolulu, Hawaii, into a family of Protestant missionaries. He studied history and geography at Yale, Berkeley, and Harvard, and specialized in the colonial history of South America. He was a scholar with the ambitions of an explorer, fascinated by the routes the Spanish conquistadors had traveled during the colonial period, and especially by the story of the last refuge of the Inca Empire, the rebel city of Vilcabamba, where the Incas resisted for decades after the conquest.
Bingham was not a trained archaeologist. He was a historian and geographer. That helps explain how he approached the site when he found it, with the eyes of an explorer and storyteller more than those of a scientist. His main purpose on the 1911 expedition was not to find Machu Picchu, but to locate Vilcabamba, the last Inca capital, and he had come to Peru with that specific goal.
The context of the 1911 journey
Bingham arrived in Peru in July 1911 leading an expedition funded by Yale University and the National Geographic Society. It was his second visit to Peru. He had previously been there in 1909, following colonial historical routes, and had heard mentions of ruins in the Urubamba Valley area.
At that time, the Urubamba Valley was a remote region with very little presence from the Peruvian state. There were a few haciendas and scattered farming communities, along with a rudimentary road following the course of the river. Local farmers knew about the existence of ruins at different points on the mountain slopes because they used them as farmland. The Inca agricultural terraces were fertile land that peasants continued to use centuries after the citadel had been abandoned.
July 24, 1911
Bingham was camped beside the Urubamba River when Melchor Arteaga, the owner of a small local farm, mentioned the existence of ruins high on the mountain called Machu Picchu. Bingham paid Arteaga the equivalent of one Peruvian sol to guide him there.
The ascent was difficult. The slope was covered in dense vegetation, and the incline was steep. When they reached the upper part, they found a farming family, the Recharte family, who had established their garden among the ruins and had been living there for several years. It was the children of that family who first guided Bingham through the site while the adults continued with their daily work.
What Bingham found that day was a citadel covered in vegetation but remarkably well preserved. The stone walls were still standing, the agricultural terraces were still recognizable, and the quality of the masonry was obvious even beneath the moss and plants that had grown over the stone for centuries. Bingham took photographs, made notes, and returned to camp convinced that he had found something extraordinary, although at that moment he was not exactly sure what it was.
The debate over the discovery
The term “discovery,” which is associated with Bingham and 1911, is one of the most debated in the history of American archaeology. There are several aspects of that story that need to be clarified.
First, the Recharte family and Melchor Arteaga knew about the site before Bingham arrived. Local peasants knew about the ruins and used them. They were not a local secret, but an everyday reality for those living in that part of the Urubamba Valley.
Second, there are indications that at least one other European explorer visited the site before Bingham. The German engineer August Berns traveled through the area in the 1860s, and there is documentary evidence that he knew about ruins in that area, although he neither documented them thoroughly nor introduced them to the academic world.
Third, the Peruvian historian Simón Bolívar Custodio and others left inscriptions on the site’s walls before 1911, confirming that the place had been visited occasionally before Bingham’s arrival.
What Bingham did do in a unique way was bring the site to international academic and public attention. His photographs, first published in National Geographic in April 1913 in an entire issue dedicated to Machu Picchu, were the first images of the site to reach a mass audience outside Peru. Those photographs are what turned Machu Picchu into a destination of global interest.
The expeditions of 1912 and 1915
Bingham returned to the site in 1912 and again in 1915, leading more organized expeditions with greater funding from Yale and National Geographic. During those two returns, more systematic excavations were carried out, the main structures were documented, and thousands of items were removed, including human bones, ceramics, bronze tools, textiles, and ritual objects. All of that material was sent to the United States and deposited in the storage rooms of Yale University’s Peabody Museum.
The removal of those objects was agreed upon with the Peruvian government of the time, under the understanding that it was a temporary loan for study. The material was not returned for decades, and that situation gave rise to one of the longest heritage repatriation controversies in Latin America.
The controversy over the Yale artifacts
For nearly a century, the Peruvian government demanded the return of the objects removed by Bingham and held at Yale. For decades, the university responded with different interpretations of the original 1912 agreement, which had been written ambiguously regarding the conditions of the loan.
The resolution finally came between 2010 and 2012, when Yale and the Peruvian government reached an agreement that established the gradual return of the archaeological material. The objects were repatriated and are now part of the collection of Peru’s Ministry of Culture, displayed in museums in Cusco, including the Manuel Chávez Ballón Site Museum at kilometer 112 of the Hiram Bingham Highway, which bears that name in honor of the explorer.
The book that brought Machu Picchu to the world
Bingham’s most influential publication was the book The Lost City of the Incas, published in English in 1948, nearly four decades after the 1911 journey. In that book, Bingham recounted his expedition in the style of an adventure story and presented Machu Picchu as Vilcabamba, the last Inca capital, an identification that later archaeologists disproved. It has since been established that Vilcabamba is located elsewhere, in the jungle region of La Convención Province, and that Machu Picchu was a different construction directly linked to the reign of Pachacutec.
Despite that mistaken identification, Bingham’s book was what fixed the image of Machu Picchu in the global imagination as the lost city of the Incas, a label that is still used today even though it is technically inaccurate. The city was not lost to local residents, and it was not a capital but a royal estate.
Bingham’s legacy: light and shadow
Hiram Bingham died in 1956. His legacy is contradictory, and that contradiction is part of the site’s full history. On one hand, he was the person who documented Machu Picchu with enough photographic and academic rigor for the outside world to become aware of its existence and importance. Without that work of documentation and dissemination, the process of protection, World Heritage recognition, and tourism development that turned the site into the most visited destination in South America would not have happened in the same way or on the same timeline.
On the other hand, his work involved the removal of archaeological material that took a century to be repatriated, the use of Machu Picchu’s image to build a narrative of discovery that erased prior local knowledge, and a series of historical interpretation errors that took decades to be corrected by Peruvian archaeology.
That ambiguity is now recognized both in Peru and in the international academic world. The road that climbs from Aguas Calientes to the entrance of the site bears his name. The museum at the foot of the mountain does as well. Bingham is part of the history of Machu Picchu, even if he is not the only protagonist in that history, nor the earliest one.
Peru Sites tells the full story on every visit
At Peru Sites, we coordinate bilingual official guides who explain the history of the site from its Inca construction to its modern rediscovery, including the context of Bingham, the Yale expeditions, and the controversy over the repatriated artifacts. For a first visit, knowing that history is what turns stone walls into a living story.
