Heaney - Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu

Cradle of Gold

The Spaniards execute the last Inca emperor, Tupac Amaru, in Cuzco in 1572, as depicted by Guaman Poma de Ayala, an Inca noble and scribe, to appeal to the Spanish King in the early seventeenth century. Tupac Amarus death was preceded by the loss of Vilcabamba, the Inca city that disappeared into the jungle until the twentieth century. (The Royal Library, Denmark)

The Story of Hiram Bingham,
a Real-Life Indiana Jones,
and the Search for Machu Picchu

CHRISTOPHER HEANEY

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Illustrations by Emily Davis Adams, in the style of the sixteenth-seventeenthcentury indigenous scribe and artist Guaman Poma de Ayala

CRADLE OF GOLD
Copyright Christopher Heaney, 2010, 2011.
All rights reserved.

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First published in hardcover in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the USa division of St. Martins Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

ISBN: 978-0-230-11204-9

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Heaney, Christopher.

Cradle of gold : the story of Hiram Bingham, the extraordinary explorer who uncovered Machu Picchu and the lost history of the Incas / by Christopher Heaney.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-230-61169-6 (hardback)

(paperback ISBN: 978-0-230-11204-9)

1. Bingham, Hiram, 18751956. 2. Latin AmericanistsUnited States Biography. 3. Machu Picchu Site (Peru) 4. IncasAntiquities. 5. Cultural propertyPeru. 6. IncasHistory. 7. PeruHistoryConquest, 15221548.
I. Title.
F3429.B633H42 2010
974.604092dc22
[B]

2009038535

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Letra Libre, Inc.

First PALGRAVE MACMILLAN paperback edition: July 2011

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

For my parents,
and for JVD

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.

T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph

Map of the Vilcabamba, the region in which Hiram Bingham searched for the last cities of the Incas between 1909 and 1915. (Map by Emily Davis Adams)

South America, 1909, the scene of Hiram Binghams great successes and failures. (Map by Emily Davis Adams)

Cradle of Gold

South America, 1936. A mountain looms in the distance. A small group of men carve their way through the thick jungle. A wide hat hides the face of their leader, save for his handsome, unshaven chin. His Peruvian guides are hesitant, but he is determined. He pauses, gently unfolds a disintegrating map from the pocket of his leather jacket and studies it in the dim light breaking through the canopy. A guide behind him pulls a gun, but the leader spins around and cracks his whip, knocking the weapon away. The guide runs, and our hero, an American archaeologist, steps into the light.

The party continues its march into the jungle. Behind a wall of vines they find what theyve been looking for: a temple built by a people lost long before Columbus. Bats explode from its black and forbidding entry, and the Indian porters run away in fright. The archaeologist and the remaining guide enter. There are traps to swing over and the corpse of a previous treasure hunter who failed. It is all prelude to the temples center, where a small gold statue sits on a stone pedestal. The guide holds his breath, and the archaeologist replaces the artifact with a bag of sand. They breathe easy for a moment; but then, with a rumble and snap, the ruins come tumbling down.

This, of course, is the opening scene of the 1981 movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the debonair American archaeologist is Henry Indiana Jones Jr., played by Harrison Ford. Nearly three decades and three sequels later, weve seen Indy fight Nazis, Thuggee murder cults, and Communist clairvoyants for some of the most fantastic artifacts imaginable. But if there was an iconic moment to the series, then this is it: Indiana Jones running from a massive rolling boulder, walls falling around him, all without losing his hat. It is one of the most exciting introductions in movie history, and by the time Indy escapes an angry jungle tribe by swinging on a vine, he has lost the gold icon but captured our hearts.

I idolized him for most of my childhood. By the time I reached high school, I knew I wanted to become an archaeologist. I applied to Yale University, wrote my college essay on Indiana Jones, and was lucky enough to be admitted. But before I headed to New Haven, my father gave me a present that took me a little closer to reality. It was a t-shirt he had bought from Yales Peabody Museum of Natural History, where I had spent many hours staring at dinosaurs when I was seven. The shirt featured another star from the museums history: Machu Picchu, the beautiful lost city of the Incas, hidden in the Andes Mountains of the South American country of Peru. And on its back was the image of the tall historian who had made it famous: Hiram Bingham III.

Born in 1875, over his 81 years he was variously a professor, writer, pilot, and U.S. senator. Hiram uncovered the ruins of Machu Picchu in 1911; in 1912, he exported its skulls, bones, beautiful ceramics, and precious metal artifacts to Yale. The cotton-and-ink face staring out at me gave no indication as to the roots of his restless ambition, but I saw something of Indy in him: the jaunty stance, the cocked hat, the sandy hair, and defiant gaze, teetering between interest and impatience. He could shout, as Ford did in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, That belongs in a museum! I was unsurprised when I later learned that in crafting the look of Indiana Jones, the crew of Raiders of the Lost Ark may have drawn from a little-known Charlton Heston movie named Secret of the Incas, which in turn drew from Binghams life and work at Machu Picchu. These two icons of archaeology shared the same DNAthough at the time, I thought that Indiana Jones was the exciting, full-color version and Hiram Bingham was the sepiatoned, boring reality.

At Yale I learned how wrong I was. In 2002, when I was a senior and a Latin American Studies major, I began research in Binghams papers, archived at Yale. There, I made my own discoveries. Most accounts of Machu Picchus revelation a word preferable to discovery, in many waysbegan with Binghams quest to find the last cities of the Incas, the jungle-clad settlements where the most impressive pre-Columbian empire in the Americas took refuge from the Spanish in the sixteenth century. These accounts climaxed with Binghams arrival at Machu Picchu. Only epilogues suggested what he unearthed in his excavations. Left unexplored was a full explanation of how he did it and why he quit exploring altogether in 1915. From Binghams journals, manuscripts, and previously unexamined letters in Spanish, a far more dramatic story emerged, one full of betrayals, deaths, political intrigues, smuggling, and angry locals. It only seemed like a story of simple, heroic exploration from a distance. Beneath the hat, it was nothing less than a lost history of the Spanish conquest of Peru and its recovery through exploration; a descent into a forgotten chapter of Americas often colonial, sometimes imperial relationship with the other peoples and countries of the hemisphere; and, most pressingly, a question as thorny as the vines that held Machu Picchu together: Who can own and interpret the indigenous past?