CHAPTER 8
Mistakes

Hiram Bingham made a number of mistakes after he found Machu Picchu.

His first mistake was leaving right after he found it. He was excited when he saw the ruins at Machu Picchu—but he was disappointed at the same time. He desperately wanted to find the lost city of Vilcabamba. Hiram thought finding Vilcabamba was the best way to become famous.

So, after he photographed Machu Picchu for one day, he moved on.

He spent the next few weeks searching for the city where the Inca empire had died out. He almost found it—but he didn’t realize it. The ruins he stumbled onto were so overgrown with jungle, he couldn’t see what was there. And the buildings were much less beautiful than those at Machu Picchu. So Hiram figured this couldn’t possibly be the famous city that he was seeking.

Hiram finally gave up and went home. He had found Vilcabamba without knowing it! The lost city wasn’t correctly identified until more than fifty years later, by another explorer who came to Peru in 1964. Hiram had been right about one thing, though. The ruins at Vilcabamba were nothing compared to the gorgeous mountaintop palace he had found.

By this time, one of Hiram’s dreams had come true. He was famous. His discovery of Machu Picchu was more than enough to excite the world. Hiram wrote articles about it. Then he organized another expedition back to Peru in 1912. This time, he took more scientists with him. He also hired a team of workers to uncover more of the buildings that were overgrown with moss and vines.

Hiram’s team dug in the ground at Machu Picchu and found jewelry, pots, and tools. They also found burial caves. But the caves contained only small skeletons. Most of them were less than five feet tall. So Hiram made another mistake. He decided that all the skeletons must be women! He came up with an idea to explain why only women were living at Machu Picchu. He said the city had been a special place for female priestesses—like nuns. He called them the Virgins of the Sun.

Hiram was wrong about the skeletons. It turns out that the ancient Incas were short—the men as well as the women. Even today, most of the people who speak Quechua are shorter than people in the United States. The men are about five feet two inches tall and the women are several inches shorter. So the small skeletons Hiram had found were both men and women.

After his second trip, Hiram wrote more about Machu Picchu. National Geographic magazine printed a whole issue on just that one topic. His photographs amazed everyone. But many of Hiram’s facts were wrong. He claimed that Machu Picchu must have been the first Inca capital. He was wrong about that. But Hiram wasn’t a scientist. He was a history professor, just doing his best to figure out what the ruins could tell him about ancient Inca life.

Hiram did something else that would be considered wrong today. He took thousands of objects from Machu Picchu. With the permission of the government of Peru, he brought jewelry, carvings, tools, and skeletons back to the United States. He donated them to Yale University. For years, the Peabody Museum at Yale had a large exhibit of Inca items on display.

But today, explorers are not allowed to remove ancient items from a country, because each country has a right to keep the historical objects that are clues to its own past. So Peru asked Yale to return the Inca treasures. In 2011—one hundred years after Hiram’s discovery—the Peabody Museum finally agreed.

Still, Hiram is considered a hero, even in Peru. In 1948, Peru built a new road leading up to the ruins. They named it for him—the Hiram Bingham Highway.

Now, thanks to that road, visitors can make the trip up the mountain to Machu Picchu a lot more easily than when Hiram crawled there on his hands and knees!