Posted on 03/18/2003 1:39:14 AM PST by sarcasm
EW HAVEN — Working with new evidence and a trove of re-examined relics, many of them recovered from the basement of a Yale museum here, archaeologists have revised their thinking about the significance of Machu Picchu, the most famous "lost city" of the Incas.
The new interpretation comes more than 90 years after the explorer Hiram Bingham III bushwhacked his way to a high ridge in the Andes of Peru and beheld a dreamscape out of the pre-Columbian past.
There, set against looming peaks cloaked in snow and wreathed in cloud, was Machu Picchu. Before his eyes, rising from the green undergrowth of neglect, were the imperial stones that have entranced and mystified visitors and scholars alike.
The expression "lost city," popularized by Bingham, was the magical elixir for rundown imaginations. The words evoked the romanticism of exploration and archaeology at the time, in the summer of 1911. And the lanky and vigorous Bingham seemed to personify the spirit that was driving discoveries of a forgotten past, the curiosity and courage to go seeking in remote places, as well as the hardihood to succeed.
But finding Machu Picchu proved to be easier than solving the mystery of its place in the Inca empire, arguably the richest and most powerful in the New World when Europeans arrived. The imposing architecture attested to the skill and audacity of the Incas. But who had lived at this isolated site and for what purpose?
Bingham, a historian at Yale, advanced three hypotheses — all of them dead wrong. A revival in research in recent years, experts say, has solved the mystery and, to a large degree, demystified Machu Picchu.
The spectacular site was not, as Bingham supposed, the traditional birthplace of the Inca people or the final stronghold of the Incas in their losing struggle against Spanish conquest in the 16th century. Nor was it a sacred spiritual center occupied by chosen women, the "virgins of the sun," and presided over by priests who worshiped the sun god.
Instead, Machu Picchu was one of many private estates of the emperor and, in particular, the favored country retreat for the royal family and Inca nobility. It was, archaeologists say, the Inca equivalent of Camp David, albeit on a much grander scale.
This interpretation and other new research inform a major exhibition at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. The show, "Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas," will be here until May 3. Then it is to travel to Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Denver, Houston and Chicago.
Dr. Richard L. Burger, the director of the Peabody and a specialist in Inca archaeology, said the show, the largest on the Incas ever assembled in the United States, would "change the way people see Machu Picchu." Dr. Burger and Dr. Lucy C. Salazar, also an archaeologist, are co-curators of the exhibit.
"Bingham's work was very important in putting Inca archaeology on the map," said Dr. Burger, who is married to Dr. Salazar. "But we can now set aside all his ideas about the meaning of the Machu Picchu site."
The new interpretation, generally supported by other experts, is based largely on a study of 16th-century Spanish legal documents and a more detailed analysis of pottery, copper and bronze jewelry, tools, dwellings, skeletal remains and other material found in the ruins.
Many of the artifacts were themselves a forgotten treasure. Shipped back by Bingham, they were stashed in the museum basement, where they remained, still in their original boxes and wrapped in pages of The New York Times from the 1920's, until renewed interest in the Incas led scientists to poke into the stash.
Until recently, there had not been much scholarly interest in Machu Picchu. Although the site has long been Peru's most popular tourist draw and a mecca for seekers of mystical and spiritual experiences, the haunting shells of temples, palaces and other structures had ceased to attract many archaeologists.
"A lot of people felt it had become so much an icon for the Inca and Peru," said Dr. Craig Morris, a specialist in Peruvian archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. "They became more interested in working in places not so well known."
Bingham's long shadow may also have discouraged research. In his three expeditions to Machu Picchu from 1911 to 1915, he established himself as the "discoverer" and foremost interpreter of the lost city. His 1930 book, "Machu Picchu: A Citadel of the Incas," endured as the definitive treatise on the site. His maps and photographs of the ruins were authoritative and evocative.
But he was untrained in archaeology and he did not conduct systematic excavations and rigorous analysis. "His excavation notes," Dr. Burger said, "included more on what they were eating than what they were finding."
Bingham eventually resigned his professorship at Yale to enter politics, becoming lieutenant governor and governor of Connecticut and a senator. But his influence on Inca research remained strong, in part because of his fervid writing style.
In "Lost City of the Incas," a best seller, he wrote: "Here, concealed in a canyon of remarkable grandeur, protected by nature and by the hand of man, the `Virgins of the Sun' one by one passed away on this beautiful mountain top and left no descendants willing to reveal the importance or explain the significance of the ruins which crown the beetling precipices of Machu Picchu."
Archaeologists today forgive some of Bingham's lapses in excavation, but they have destroyed his theories.
For example, Dr. Salazar's exhaustive examination of pottery contradicted Bingham's speculation that Machu Picchu was somehow associated with the earliest Incas. All the pottery styles were 15th century. That and other evidence suggest that construction on the site began around 1450.
That was in the reign of Pachacuti, considered the Alexander the Great of the Incas. His creation, like the empire, had a relatively brief history. From the recovered pottery and Spanish documents, scholars estimate that the site was largely abandoned after only 80 years.
Plague, brought to the New World by Spaniards, had by then left the land in turmoil, and in 1532 the Spanish conquered Peru with little resistance. The few Incan holdouts, including the last emperor, capitulated in 1572 at a tropical valley refuge that bore no resemblance in Spanish descriptions to Machu Picchu. So much for another of Bingham's suppositions.
His theory about a sanctuary for virgins and priests began to unravel in 1990 with the publication of research by Dr. John Howland Rowe, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley.
In archives at Cuzco, the former Inca capital, Dr. Rowe found a 16th-century suit filed by descendants of Pachacuti. They sought the return of family lands, including a retreat called Picchu. The finding sent Dr. Burger, a onetime student of Dr. Rowe, and Dr. Salazar back to Machu Picchu.
"We then felt this was a royal estate, a country palace," Dr. Burger recalled. "All Machu Picchu is a big palace, the emperor's residence across from the temple, the dwellings and workshops, everything spread out around a great plaza."
As early as the 1960's, María Rostworowski, an ethnohistorian in Lima, pointed out that Inca rulers had established a chain of royal estates through the region. They served as occasional royal residences, but mainly as administrative centers. Many of the estates were razed by Spanish soldiers searching for gold, and some were built over and modified beyond recognition. But remote Machu Picchu, at an elevation of 6,750 feet, survived unscathed.
Dr. Susan A. Niles, an archaeologist at Lafayette College who is the author of "The Shape of Inca History," published in 1999, explained that it has long been known that the estates were peculiar to Inca royalty. Each ruler established his own and built a palace there as a monument to himself.
Each estate was the ruler's own private property, which was left to his family after death. The succeeding son could use the estates, but not own them. So he immediately began building his own monuments.
The estates, Dr. Niles said, were important centers for the economic management of agricultural lands, forests and mines in the surrounding region. That was presumably true, as well, of Machu Picchu.
Dr. Burger and Dr. Salazar agreed, but said little evidence had been found that ordinary administrative affairs were regularly conducted there. They emphasized the role of the site, 50 miles from Cuzco, as a country retreat for entertaining visiting dignitaries and for royal relaxation.
Though called a "lost city," it was not a true city. Probably no more than 750 people ever lived there at any given time, and in the rainy season the population dropped to just a few hundred. They were presumably the servants and artisans who attended to the royal family and their elite guests.
Bingham was not entirely wrong about the religious aspects of Machu Picchu. The buildings, ritual chambers, fountains and gardens, Dr. Salazar said, seemed to be arranged with Incan cosmology in mind. Rulers were believed to be descended from the sun, and wherever they went was sacred. Pachacuti, in particular, was looked upon as a creator god.
New investigations turned up bones of animals probably sacrificed in religious ceremonies. And there were dozens of obsidian pebbles, which scientific analysis showed had come from a revered volcano more than 200 miles away. The obsidian had never been modified for use as cutting tools. It is likely, Dr. Burger said, the obsidian had symbolic meaning. The Incas worshiped high mountains as the source of supernatural forces.
But Bingham had gone too far with his "virgins of the sun" hypothesis, experts say. He was misled by the findings of the party's osteologist, who reported that most of the skeletons buried at the site were those of women.
In new studies, Dr. John W. Verano, a physical anthropologist at Tulane University, determined that the ratio of female to male skeletons was comparatively even. His research also showed that many families and newborn infants lived there, not what one would expect in a community of virgins.
All the burials at the site were simple, with only modest grave goods. These were the remains of the retainers rather than royalty.
"This mortuary pattern," Dr. Burger said, "is not surprising, because if members of the Inca elite had died while residing at the country palace, they would have been transported to their principal residence in Cuzco rather than being buried at Machu Picchu."
Life at the country retreat must have been reasonably healthy. An analysis of bones showed that the workers apparently ate well. There were cases of tuberculosis and parasites, as well as considerable tooth decay from the corn diets. But nearly all the burials were of adults, including quite a few who were older than 50, an advanced age in that day.
The workers were brought from all over the empire, Dr. Verano concluded. The ethnic diversity was seen in the shapes of skulls, which had been deformed through binding in infancy. Different cultures over a wide geographic range had distinctive cranial deformations. Some came from the coast, and others from the highlands and as far away as Lake Titicaca.
Investigations by Dr. Alfredo Valencia Zegarra, a Peruvian archaeologist, and Kenneth Wright, a hydrological engineer from Boulder, Colo., have uncovered the magnitude of Machu Picchu as an engineering achievement. The Incas had not only terraced the slopes for agriculture, hauling up fine sand and topsoil from the valley and erecting stone retaining walls that have survived more than 500 years. But they had also taken an uneven ridge surface and transformed it to the flat mesalike surface seen today.
Before any of the buildings rose, the Incas leveled the site with loose rock and other fill, stabilizing it with immense walls deep beneath the surface. Mr. Wright estimates that the invisible subsurface construction constitutes some 60 percent of the effort invested in building Machu Picchu.
Whatever Pachacuti, the empire builder, had in mind, Dr. Salazar said, Machu Picchu "shows what the New World had achieved before the Spanish arrived." Some of the engineering and architecture was better than in Seville, she noted, and the Spanish "could not believe how people, people without writing, could have built something like this."
Archaeologists today may have demystified the lofty ruins, but their awe remains undiminished.
Dr. Niles of Lafayette College said the "overpowering landscape alone may be why Pachacuti chose the place for what his legacy to the world should be."
Conceding that he was biased, Dr. Morris of the Natural History Museum said that Machu Picchu "is to me the most spectacular archaeological site in the world."
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