Bingham could not resist Romero’s story. When he returned to Yale, he persuaded the millionaire banker Edward Harkness, who was a member of the board of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, a friend of Henry Clay Frick and John Rockefeller, and a collector of Peruvian artefacts, to fund an expedition. In the summer of 1911 Bingham’s expedition set out and enjoyed a measure of good fortune, not unlike that of Arthur Evans at Knossos. In 1911 the Urumbamba Valley was being opened up anyway, due to the great Amazonian rubber boom. (Malaya had not yet replaced South America as the chief source of the world’s rubber.)43 Bingham assembled his crew at Cuzco, 350 miles southeast of Lima and the ancient centre of the Inca Empire. The mule train started out in July, down the new Urumbamba road. A few days out from Cuzco, Bingham’s luck struck. The mule train was camped between the new road and the Urumbamba River.44 The noise of the mules and the smell of cooking (or the other way around) attracted the attention of a certain Melchor Arteaga, who lived alone nearby in a run-down shack. Chatting to members of Bingham’s crew and learning what their aim was, Arteaga mentioned that there were some ruins on the top of a hill that lay across the river. He had been there ‘once before.’45 Daunted by the denseness of the jungle and the steepness of the canyon, no one felt inclined to check out Arteaga’s tip – no one, that is, except Bingham himself. Feeling it was his duty to follow all leads, he set out with Arteaga on the morning of 24 July, having persuaded one other person, a Peruvian sergeant named Carrasco, to accompany them.46 They crossed the roaring rapids of the Urumbamba using a makeshift bridge of logs linking the boulders. Bingham was so terrified that he crawled across on all fours. On the far side they found a path through the forest, but it was so steep at times that, again, they were forced to crawl. In this manner they climbed two thousand feet above the river, where they stopped for lunch. To Bingham’s surprise, he found they were not alone; up here there were two ‘Indians’ who had made themselves a farm. What was doubly surprising was that the farm was formed from a series of terraces – and the terraces were clearly very old.47 Finishing lunch, Bingham was of two minds. The terraces were interesting, but no more than that. An afternoon of yet more climbing was not an attractive proposition. On the other hand, he had come all this way, so he decided to go on. Before he had gone very far, he realised he had made the right decision. Just around the side of a hill, he came upon a magnificent flight of stone terraces – a hundred of them – rising for nearly a thousand feet up the hillside.48 As he took in the sight, he realised that the terraces had been roughly cleared, but beyond them the deep jungle resumed, and anything might be hidden there. Forgetting his tiredness, he swiftly scaled the terraces – and there, at the top, half hidden among the lush green trees and the spiky undergrowth, he saw ruin after ruin. With mounting excitement, he identified a holy cave and a three-sided temple made of granite ashlars – huge stones carved into smooth squares or rectangles, which fitted together with the precision and beauty of the best buildings in Cuzco. In Bingham’s own words, ‘We walked along a path to a clearing where the Indians had planted a small vegetable garden. Suddenly we found ourselves standing in front of the ruins of two of the finest and most interesting structures in ancient America. Made of beautiful white granite, the walls contained blocks of Cyclopean size, higher than a man. The sight held me spellbound…. Each building had only three walls and was entirely open on one side. The principal temple had walls 12 feet high which were lined with exquisitely made niches, five high up at each end, and seven on the back. There were seven courses of ashlars in the end walls. Under the seven rear niches was a rectangular block 14 feet long, possibly a sacrificial altar, but more probably a throne for the mummies of departed Incas, brought out to be worshipped. The building did not look as though it had ever had a roof. The top course of beautifully smooth ashlars was left uncovered so that the sun could be welcomed here by priests and mummies. I could scarcely believe my senses as I examined the larger blocks in the lower course and estimated that they must weigh from ten to fifteen tons each. Would anyone believe what I had found? Fortunately … I had a good camera and the sun was shining.’49
One of the temples he inspected on that first day contained three huge windows – much too large to serve any useful purpose. The windows jogged his memory, and he recalled an account, written in 1620, about how the first Inca, Manco the Great, had ordered ‘works to be executed at the place of his birth, consisting of a masonry wall with three windows.’ ‘Was that what I had found? If it was, then this was not the capital of the last Inca but the birthplace of the first. It did not occur to me that it might be both.’ On his very first attempt, Hiram Bingham had located Machu Picchu, what would become the most famous ruin in South America.50
Though Bingham returned in 1912 and 1915 to make further surveys and discoveries, it was Machu Picchu that claimed the world’s attention. The city that emerged from the careful excavations had a beauty that was all its own.51 This was partly because so many of the buildings were constructed from interlocking Inca masonry, and partly because the town was remarkably well preserved, intact to the roofline. Then there was the fact of the city’s unity – house groups surrounded by tidy agricultural terraces, and an integrated network of paths and stairways, hundreds of them. This made it easy for everyday life in Inca times to be imagined. The location of Machu Picchu was also extraordinary: after the jungle had been cleared, the remoteness on a narrow ridge surrounded by a hairpin canyon many feet below was even more apparent. An exquisite civilisation had been isolated in a savage jungle.52
Bingham was convinced that Machu Picchu was Vilcabamba. One reason he thought this was because he had discovered, beyond the city, no fewer than 135 skeletons, most of them female and many with skulls that had been trepanned, though none in the town itself. Bingham deduced that the trepanned skulls belonged to foreign warriors who had not been allowed inside what was clearly a holy city. (Not everyone agrees with this interpretation.) A second exciting and strange discovery added to this picture: a hollow tube was found which Bingham believed had been used for inhalation. He thought the tube had probably formed part of an elaborate religious ceremony and that the substance inhaled was probably a narcotic such as the yellow seed of the local huilca tree. By extension, therefore, this one tube could be used to explain the name Vilcabamba: plain (bamba) of Huilca. Bingham’s final argument for identifying the site as Vilcabamba was based on the sheer size of Machu Picchu. Its roughly one hundred houses made it the most important ruin in the area, and ancient Spanish sources had described Vilcabamba as the largest city in the province – therefore it seemed only common sensical that when Manco Inca sought refuge from Pizarro’s cavalry he would have fallen back to this well-defended place.53 These arguments seemed incontrovertible. Machu Picchu was duly identified as Vilcabamba, and for half a century the majority of archaeological and historical scholars accepted that the city was indeed the last refuge of Manco Inca, the site of his wife’s terrible torture and death.54
Bingham was later proved wrong. But at the time, his discoveries, like Boas’s and Morgan’s, acted as a careful corrective to the excesses of the race biologists who were determined to jump to the conclusion that, following Darwin, the races of the world could be grouped together on a simple evolutionary tree. The very strangeness of the Incas, the brilliance of their art and buildings, the fantastic achievement of their road network, stretching over 19,000 miles and superior in some ways to the European roads of the same period, showed the flaws in the glib certainties of race biology. For those willing to listen to the evidence in various fields, evolution was a much more complex process than the social Darwinists allowed.