1710. Juan Arias Diaz Topete, a mineral prospector, travels into the interior of the Vilcabamba and leaves a document (only recently discovered) listing the four principal Inca sites he comes across. Three of the sites correspond to the modern names of Espiritu Pampa, Vitcos and Choquequirao. However, the fourth site he describes, apparently equally large, has, at the time of writing, yet to be found.
1768. Cosmé Bueno, travelling through the area, writes that all mining activity has effectively ceased and that ‘there has remained only the memory of the retreat of the Incas’.
1781. Tupac Amaru II, a descendant of the last Incas, leads a rebellion against the Spanish, ending in the siege of Cuzco. He is captured, then hung, drawn and quartered.
1814. Alexander von Humboldt publishes Vues de Cordillères et Monuments des Peuples Indigènes de l’Amérique, which helps focus attention on pre-Columbian civilisations such as the Incas and suggests that they are a legitimate area of study.
1833–4. The Comte de Sartiges, an enterprising young French diplomat based in Lima, leads an expedition around Mt Salcantay to reach the Santa Teresa valley, from where he cuts his way through to Choquequirao. A humane observer of Andean life, he criticises the priests for extorting money from the faithful villagers and the hacendados for holding their workers in perpetual credit bondage to ‘the company store’.
1847. Léonce Angrand visits Choquequirao by the same route and makes drawings of the site. Both he and Sartiges report that this must be Old Vilcabamba, the last city of the Incas.
1847. William Prescott, a half-blind American lawyer, publishes his History of the Conquest of Peru, using source material from the Spanish archives. This precipitates a search for further source material in those archives.
1865. Raimondi, the great Italian geographer, visits the Vilcabamba area, although not the section of the Urubamba near Machu Picchu.
1872. Baltasar de la Torre leads an expedition from Cuzco beyond Paucartambo and into the jungle. He is killed, but the German engineer who accompanies him, Herman Göhring, survives and in 1874 publishes an account and map which mentions both Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu.
1875. Charles Wiener visits Ollantaytambo. Told of possible ruins at Machu Picchu, and mentions these names in his book of 1880, but does not visit them.
1877. George Ephraim Squier publishes Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas and draws attention to the Tiahuanaco ruins.
1879–83. The War of the Pacific between Chile, on the one hand, and Peru and Bolivia, on the other, over a valuable region in the northern Atacama Desert. Peru and Bolivia are defeated, with a considerable loss of territory: Bolivia loses its vital access to the Pacific.
1891. Raimondi’s map is published, featuring ‘Mt Machu Picchu’, but not indicating that there are ruins there.
1892. Alphons Stubel and Max Uhle publish Die Ruinenstatten von Tiahuanaco im Hochlande des Alten Peru, a detailed assessment of the Tiahuanaco culture.
1895. A road is blasted down the Urubamba valley to aid the rubber plantations downstream.
1896–7. Max Uhle excavates at Pachacamac. Along with earlier work at Tiahuanaco, this confirms his idea that there had been many civilisations predating the Incas who had also expanded to influence large areas of territory.
1908. Guaman Poma’s magnificent manuscript, Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno, a description of the Inca realm originally written as a letter to the King of Spain and never published, is discovered in the Royal Library of Copenhagen. Written in a Joycean mixture of exuberant Spanish and Quechua, it is copiously illustrated with the writer’s own drawings and gives a particularly sympathetic picture of Inca customs.
1909. Hiram Bingham visits Choquequirao in February, the rainy season, approaching along the shorter route from the Apurimac.
1911. The next Bingham expedition finds Machu Picchu (on 24 July), using this same road. Subsequently he travels on down the Urubamba to discover Vitcos (on the hill at Rosaspata), the White Rock (Chuquipalta or Ñusta España) and the site of Espiritu Pampa, although he only finds a small outlying section of these last ruins. On the basis of these discoveries, he claims that Machu Picchu is Old Vilcabamba, the ‘last city of the Incas’.
1912. Bingham returns to clear and excavate the site of Machu Picchu. His colleague George Eaton analyses skeletons and concludes (erroneously) that there were more females than males at Machu Picchu. Bingham explores the Aobamba valley and finds Llactapata and Pallcay.
1914–15. The fourth and final Bingham expedition. He discovers a large section of the Inca road leading up to Machu Picchu from Cusichaca, now referred to as ‘the Inca Trail’.
1919. Julio Tello excavates at Chavin de Huantar, the cradle of one of the most ancient of Peruvian cultures, the Chavin (800–200 BC).
1925. Julio Tello excavates on the Paracas peninsula and finds mummies wrapped in fine textiles, with gold masks.
1920s–30s. Cuzco photographer Martin Chambi goes on private visits to Machu Picchu and photographs the ruins, which have largely become covered again by vegetation.
1931. The Shippee-Johnson aerial expedition maps much of Peru, including the Urubamba valley, from the air, revealing many new archaeological details. (They produce a film in 1931, Wings Over the Andes.)
1934. Peruvian archaeologist Luis Valcárcel clears Machu Picchu.
1937. After many years of wandering in the Vilcabamba hills, the prospector Christian Bües draws a detailed map of the area. He dies afterwards of drink and poverty.
1940–41. The Paul Fejos expedition from the United States discovers the Wiñay Wayna and Inti Pata sites close to Machu Picchu, and the remaining section of the modern ‘Inca Trail’.
1945. The crucial first part of Martin de Murúa’s Historia General del Perú is discovered in the Duke of Wellington’s library (having been taken from Spain in the Peninsular Wars). It contains specific details about the last city of the Incas, Old Vilcabamba, which help a later identification of Espiritu Pampa as that site: that it lay at a low altitude, that it was burnt at the time of the final Spanish taking of it and (most importantly of all) that the Incas used Spanish roofing tiles on the buildings. The manuscript is published in 1962.
1948. Hiram Bingham publishes The Lost City of the Incas, in which he still asserts that Machu Picchu was the site of Old Vilcabamba.
1950. Earthquake in Cuzco. The homes of thirty-five thousand people are destroyed. Some colonial buildings collapse, revealing Inca structures beneath.
1952. Victor von Hagen leads an expedition from Lake Titicaca to Quito following the Inca Royal Road. In Cuzco he comes across the Christian Bües map. His associates revisit the Puncuyoc hills north of Yupanqa and see the Inca Wasi site.
Che Guevara arrives in Cuzco.
1953. Julian Tennant and Sebastian Snow go on an expedition to the lower Urubamba, which Tennant describes in Quest for Paititi.
1961. The Richard Mason and John Hemming expedition to the Iriri river in the Amazon. Mason is killed.
1963. G. Brooks Baedeland and Peter Gimbel parachute into the plateau of north-western Vilcabamba, as this is the only way of gaining access. They are aided by Nicholas Asheshov. The team cover the whole plateau, but find nothing and have difficulty in leaving.
1964–5. Gene Savoy penetrates further into the jungle at Espiritu Pampa and reveals that the site there is far more extensive than Bingham had realised. Further Savoy expeditions are curtailed by the growth of the guerrilla movement led by Hugo Blanco. Savoy switches focus to the Chachapoyan ruins in the north, discovering Gran Pajatén in 1965 and Gran Vilaya in 1985.
1970. Robert Nichols dies in mysterious circumstances looking for Paititi in the Peruvian jungle. Nicholas Asheshov goes in search of him. The circumstances of his death are finally revealed by Yoshiharu Sekino.
The publication of John Hemming’s Conquest of the Incas establishes beyond doubt that the ruins at Espiritu Pampa are the remains of Old Vilcabamba and therefore ‘the last city of the Incas’. One key piece of evidence is supplied by the recently discovered source material of Martin de Murúa.
1972. Death of Martin Chambi.
1977–83. The Cusichaca Project led by Ann Kendall excavates sites around the bottom of the Cusichaca valley and works with the local community to restore Incaic irrigation canals.
1979. The Cusichaca Project, working with John Beauclerk, locate the neo-Inca site of Acobamba near Arma, the possible residence of Titu Cusi.
1982. David Drew of the Cusichaca Project, working with an expedition led by Hugh Thomson, re-find the site of Llactapata between Santa Teresa and the Aobamba valley, within sight of Machu Picchu.
Hugh Thomson expedition goes on to follow the route of the Comte de Sartiges from the Santa Teresa valley towards Choquequirao and finds the nearby Espa Unuyoc site (later renamed Pinchiyoq Unu), which has Chachapoyan elements.
1983. A document of 1568 is discovered in a Cuzco archive: compiled by Augustinian monks, it lists properties in the Urubamba valley and makes clear that Machu Picchu was part of ‘the royal estate of Pachacuti’, as John H. Rowe describes in an article published in 1987.
1984. Vincent Lee, with his ‘Sixpac Manco’ expedition, identifies the site of Huayna Pucará, the fort used by the Incas in their defensive withdrawal from the Spanish. This is further confirmation of the identification of Espiritu Pampa as Old Vilcabamba.
1987. The discovery of the intact tomb of Sipán, a Moche burial site in the north of Peru, with a rich panoply of turquoise armour and gold jewellery. The finds are excavated and preserved by Walter Alva.
1984–90. Increased activity by the Sendero Luminoso in the Apurimac region, and the consequent Peruvian military response, make working in the Vilcabamba area difficult. John Ridgway describes the difficulties when travelling through the area in 1984 in search of the explorer and guide Elvin Berg (he discovers that Berg has been murdered by the Sendero).
1990. Robert Randall dies of rabies when on an expedition with the Cuzco Ramblers.
Sonia Guillén publishes a re-evaluation of George Eaton’s analysis of the skeletons at Machu Picchu.
1983–99. Ann Kendall continues with a series of community-based archaeological projects near Ayacucho and Ollantaytambo.
1993–6. Perci Paz and fellow archaeologists from COPESCO excavate at Choquequirao.
1994–9. Elva Torres of the INC begins small-scale excavation works around the buildings and tombs of Machu Picchu.
1998. A landslide destroys the lower Aobamba valley and sweeps away the railway below Machu Picchu.