Peru and Yale University spent nearly a hundred years fighting over the repatriation of thousands of Machu Picchu artifacts and human remains, a dispute that included street protests, lawsuits, and even a threat by Peru to bring criminal charges against Yale.
But you wouldn’t know it from the exhibits at the Machu Picchu Museum here, where many of those very same urns, knives, and jewelry pieces taken from the mountaintop Inca palace in the 1910s by an adventurous Yale history instructor now reside.
That’s no accident. The museum was established jointly by Yale and Peru’s National University of San Antonio Abad of Cusco (known by its acronym, Unsaac) as part of the November 2010 deal that resolved the long-running dispute.
And the two professors now shaping the museum’s future, Richard L. Burger of Yale and Cayo A. Garcia Miranda of Unsaac, say the new museum is far more important as an institution to advance collaborative research on Machu Picchu and the Inca empire than as a monument to old acrimonies. Even that intrepid historian, Hiram Bingham III—criticized by some over the years as a clumsy scholar and a plunderer of Peru’s national patrimony—comes out looking pretty good.
As Mr. Garcia advised a visitor during a walk-through of the exhibits this spring, the museum has reason enough to celebrate Bingham, an American who first encountered the overgrown ruins of Machu Picchu in 1911 and later popularized the marvel of its plazas, shrines, and agricultural innovations after follow-up expeditions in 1912 and 1914.
“The special value of Bingham was to see,” said Mr. Garcia, gesturing at a giant photo that shows the expedition-attired academic posing alongside a meticulously constructed wall of straight-cut stones, its three openings partially obscured by vines. Today’s Machu Picchu tourists would recognize it as the Temple of the Three Windows.
Mr. Garcia, a professor of architecture, paused again at a map drawn by Bingham showing the many 700-year-old terraces, most fed by stone-lined irrigation canals, that interlace the Machu Picchu complex. “He visited them all,” the professor said, pointing out the spots.
The Bingham photos and maps, along with more than 300 “museum quality” objects collected by his expeditions, have been on display here since the October 2011 opening of the museum in the 15th-century Casa Concha, a two-story mix of Incan and Spanish colonial architecture with dozens of smaller rooms lining its four open-air courtyards.
The artifacts, many of which were once part of a Yale-organized traveling exhibition, were the first of the Machu Picchu treasures to be returned to Peru, in March 2011, just months after the dispute was resolved. A second shipment of 27 crates, including most of the skeletal remains, was delivered later that year. For now, its contents sit out of public view in climate-controlled areas of the building.
Last month the museum took ownership of the last and biggest cache of artifacts from Yale, a shipment of 127 crates holding 40,000 cataloged objects. Yale rushed to make the delivery a month ahead of schedule so it could take advantage of FedEx’s offer to fly the material as far as Lima free of charge as long as it wasn’t during the busy Christmas season. From there, the crates were flown in two Peruvian military jets to the small Cusco airport, and then trucked to the museum in the heart of this ancient Incan capital city, located 50 miles southeast of Machu Picchu.
“Now we can really focus on getting the center up and going,” said Mr. Burger, a professor of anthropology who, along with his wife, Lucy C. Salazar, who works as a curator at Yale’s Peabody Museum, was in Cusco to oversee the final handoff.
Life in the Palace
Already the Yale-Unsaac research institute attached to the museum is planning academic seminars to train local archaeologists. This summer it will teach Peruvian archaeology professors how to use ground-penetrating radar to see subsoil fractures that can help guide excavations. It will also teach them techniques for analyzing animal remains, an approach Mr. Burger says is of growing importance for archaeology because “it sheds light on diet.”
As for the exhibit, it offers a window into the life of the palace, built during the rule of the Inca king Pachacutec, in the early 1400s. “The Machu Picchu collection is special for the context,” said Mr. Garcia. Each piece is so well cataloged that “we know where it came from.”
The artifacts include urpus, the giant clay urns with narrow necks used to ferment chicha, a corn-mash liquor that was a staple of the Incan diet and is still served at homes and restaurants throughout the Sacred Valley, connecting Cusco to Machu Picchu. They also include knitting needles, necklaces, shawl pins, bowls for mixing cosmetics, and even some tiny, dice-like objects believed to have been used in religious ceremonies or an Incan version of craps.
Most notably, the collection also includes samples of metal objects including a five-inch tool, shaped like an ax, that was found to contain elements of bismuth, a material produced through a series of sophisticated steps. “They were clearly experimenting,” said Mr. Burger. “We don’t usually think of that as one of the activities that people do at palaces.”
The artifacts in the last shipment, which Ms. Salazar and her Unsaac colleagues will be unpacking for the next few weeks, open up new opportunities for research about Machu Picchu.
“They are collected from different rooms of the site,” and study of them could shed more light on “how the site functioned,” Mr. Burger noted. And while the artifacts include many more fragments and partial pieces than does the collection on display, he said that with modern archaeological technologies, those lesser pieces could nonetheless answer many questions.
Potsherds used to be significant only if you could see the decoration or the shape, but with techniques to analyze caked-on residue or baked-in starch particles, scientists can tell a lot about how an item was used. Yale graduate students did some initial analysis of the objects before they were packed for shipment. Still, Mr. Burger said, “a lot of the material could do with additional study.”
It’s for that reason, he said, that he’s so happy that the dispute over the artifacts was resolved by creating a partnership with Unsaac and establishing the museum and research institute.
“One of the things Yale was very anxious about was the commitment of Cusco to keep the material in secure, environmentally protected” facilities, said Mr. Burger, who with Ms. Salazar helped to quietly negotiate with the university while Yale and the government of Peru were still publicly fighting.
“Any solution had to be one that was consistent with our values as scholars, as archaeologists,” he said in an interview last week during a stopover in Washington en route from Cusco to New Haven. Unsaac “shared our interest in the conservation, in the continued research, in making it available to the people of Cusco.”
Bingham’s Bad Rap
The idea for establishing the museum in the Casa Concha, which had been given to Unsaac in 2001, came from the university’s former rector—a fitting turn of events, considering that it was a previous rector of Unsaac, Albert Giesecke, who had told Bingham about the Inca cities back in 1911. (The connections run even deeper: John Rowe, the expert on Latin American archaeology who would later become Mr. Burger’s Ph.D. adviser, helped to establish the archaeology department at Unsaac in the mid-1940s.)
Like Mr. Garcia, Mr. Burger says much of the criticism of Bingham is unfair—not just the rap that he was wrong to carry out archaeology when he was trained only as a historian, but also the claim of some Peruvians that he was a waquero, a person who takes artifacts out of their context. In 1911 there were no archaeologists trained in Latin America, Mr. Burger said, and “the map he made in 1912 is really the best map that’s ever been made of Machu Picchu.”
Bingham’s approach to excavation—taking samples from each sector of the massive complex—was also on target. “That’s what an archaeologist would do today,” said Mr. Burger, who is himself an expert on Peruvian cultures that predate the Incas by thousands of years.
For Mr. Burger, the Casa Concha, constructed as a palace by Pachacutec’s son and, after the Spanish conquest, embellished with Baroque and other European elements, makes for a perfect museum setting. “It situates the exhibition within the history of Cusco,” he said.
With ample space, museum officials are already planning new exhibits. “A lot of people want a room on the environment and ecology” of Machu Picchu, Mr. Burger explained. And because Mr. Garcia is an architect by training, “he wants to do a room on Incan construction techniques.”
To Mr. Burger, one of the unfortunate things about the conflict over the artifacts was that it “misguidedly strengthened” arguments that he said “slander” Bingham. But that doesn’t overshadow his pleasure with the way Yale and Peru finally settled their differences.
“Look at the Elgin Marbles"—the classical statues from the Acropolis that now sit in the British Museum despite objections from Greece—Mr. Burger said by way of example, and you can see that such a rapprochement was hardly inevitable.
“Resolving a patrimony dispute in this way is really a new model,” he said. As for the fact that the museum will be part of a new research institute, he said, “that’s much rarer.”