Hiram Bingham

Hiram Bingham brought Machu Picchu to international attention in 1911 and later served as a governor and a United States senator. He was born in Honolulu to a missionary family, took a doctorate in Latin American history at Harvard, and lectured at Yale. The 1911 Yale Peruvian Expedition was looking for Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the Inca resistance after 1536. Guided by local farmers, one of whose sons led him the last stretch, he reached a ridge between two peaks where families were already living and farming among the terraces. He did not discover it in any sense a Peruvian would accept: people in the valley knew it, earlier visitors had left their names on the walls, and Bingham's contribution was scientific description, photographs in National Geographic, and clearance of the vegetation. He also believed to the end that it was Vilcabamba, which it is not. He removed thousands of artefacts to Yale under permits whose terms Peru disputed for a century; the collections were returned between 2011 and 2012 after litigation and an agreement. He commanded a flying school in the First World War, was elected governor of Connecticut and then senator within a year, and was censured by the Senate in 1929 for putting a lobbyist on his payroll. His grandfather and father were both missionaries in the Pacific, and the family name is on a good deal of Hawaii. He is often named as a model for Indiana Jones, which his family has denied and which persists anyway. Machu Picchu became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1983 and now receives some 1.5 million visitors a year, which is its own preservation problem.

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