Hiram Bingham III (November 19, 1875-June 6, 1956) was an American academic, explorer, and politician. He made public the existence of the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in 1911 with the guidance of local indigenous farmers.
Later, Bingham served as Governor of Connecticut for a single day, the shortest term in history, and then as a member of the United States Senate.
Bingham was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, the son of Clara Brewster and Hiram Bingham II (1831–1908), an early Protestant missionary to the Kingdom of Hawai'i, the grandson of Hiram Bingham I and Sybil Moseley Bingham, earlier missionaries. He attended O'ahu College, now known as Punahou School, from 1882 to 1892.
Bingham went to the United States in his teens in order to complete his education, entering Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, from which he graduated in 1894.
Bingham earned a B.A. degree from Yale College in 1898, a degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1900, where he took one of the first courses on Latin American history offered in the United States, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1905.
More information: Smithsonian Magazine
Since Harvard at the time did not have a specialist in Latin American history, Edward Gaylord Bourne of Yale served as the examiner for Bingham's qualifying exams. While at Yale, Bingham was a member of Acacia fraternity. He taught history and politics at Harvard and then served as preceptor under Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.
Princeton did not much favour Latin American history, so in 1907, when Yale sought a replacement for Bourne, who had died an early death, it appointed Bingham as a lecturer in South American history.
Bingham was one of the pioneers of teaching and research on Latin American history in the U.S. In 1908, he published an assessment of the field's prospects, The Possibilities of South American History and Politics as a Field for Research, in which he surveyed library and archival resources in the U.S. as well as in South America. From 1924, he was a member of the Acorn Club.
Bingham was not a trained archaeologist. Yet it was during Bingham's time as a lecturer and professor in South American history at Yale that he rediscovered the largely forgotten Inca city of Machu Picchu.
More information: Time
In 1908, he had served as a delegate to the First Pan American Scientific Congress at Santiago, Chile. On his way home via Peru, a local prefect convinced him to visit the pre-Columbian city of Choquequirao.
Bingham published an account of this trip in Across South America; an account of a journey from Buenos Aires to Lima by way of Potosí, with notes on Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru.
Bingham was thrilled by the prospect of unexplored Inca cities, and organized the 1911 Yale Peruvian Expedition, one of the objectives of which was to search for the last capital of the Incas.
Guided by locals, he rediscovered and correctly identified both Vitcos (then called Rosaspata) and Vilcabamba (then called Espíritu Pampa), which he named Eromboni Pampa, but did not correctly recognize Vilcabamba as the last capital, instead continuing onward and misidentifying Machu Picchu as the Lost City of the Incas.
Decades later, Bingham's oversight was rectified by the Andean explorer Vince Lee, whose detailed researches proved that Vilcabamba was indeed the Incas' last capital.
On July 24, 1911, Melchor Arteaga led Bingham to Machu Picchu,
which had been largely forgotten by everybody except the small number
of people living in the immediate valley, possibly including two local
missionaries named Thomas Payne and Stuart McNairn whose descendants
claim that they had already climbed to the ruins in 1906. Also, the Cusco explorers Enrique Palma, Gabino Sanchez, and Agustín Lizarraga are said to have arrived at the site in 1901.
Bingham returned to Peru in 1912, 1914, and 1915 with the support of Yale and the National Geographic Society.
In The Lost City of the Incas (1948), Bingham related how he came to believe that Machu Picchu housed a major religious shrine and served as a training centre for religious leaders.
Modern archaeological research has since determined that the site was not a religious centre but a royal estate to which Inca leaders and their entourage repaired during the Andean summer. A key element of the expeditions' legacy are the collections of exotic animals, antiquities, and human skeletal remains. These objects exposed the modern world to a new view of ancient Peru and allowed 20th-century interpreters to interpret Machu Picchu as a lost city that Bingham scientifically discovered.
Bingham merged his reliance on prospecting by local huaqueros with the notion that science had a sovereign claim on all artefacts that might contribute to the accumulation of knowledge.
Yale University in 2012 began returning to Peru thousands of objects Bingham took to Yale from Macchu Picchu by permission of a decree by the Peruvian government. Peru argued that the objects were only loaned to Yale, not given.
Machu Picchu has become one of the major tourist attractions in South America, and Bingham is recognized as the man who brought the site to world attention, although many others helped. The switchback-filled road that carries tourist buses to the site from the Urubamba River is called Carretera Hiram Bingham (the Hiram Bingham Highway).
Bingham has been cited as one possible basis for the character Indiana Jones. His book Lost City of the Incas became a bestseller upon its publication in 1948.
Peru has long sought the return of the estimated 40,000 artefacts, including mummies, ceramics, and bones, that Bingham excavated and exported from Machu Picchu.
More information: Connecticut History
On September 14, 2007, an agreement was made between Yale University and the Peruvian government for the objects' return.
On April 12, 2008, the Peruvian government said it had revised previous estimates of 4,000 pieces up to 40,000.
Soon after Bingham announced the existence of Machu Picchu others came forward claiming to have seen the city first, such as the British missionary Thomas Payne and a German engineer named J. M. von Hassel.
Recent discoveries have put forth a new claimant, a German named Augusto Berns who bought land opposite the Machu Picchu mountain in the 1860s and then tried to raise money from investors to plunder nearby Incan ruins. An 1874 map shows the site of Machu Picchu.
On June 6, 1956, Bingham died at his Washington, D.C. home. He was interred at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
More information: Machu Picchu Trek
Machu Picchu, Machu Pikchu in Quechua, is a 15th-century Inca citadel, located in the Eastern Cordillera of southern Peru, on a 2,430-metre mountain ridge.
It is located in the Machupicchu District within Urubamba Province above the Sacred Valley, which is 80 kilometres northwest of Cuzco. The Urubamba River flows past it, cutting through the Cordillera and creating a canyon with a tropical mountain climate.
Most archaeologists believe that Machu Picchu was constructed as an estate for the Inca emperor Pachacuti (1438–1472). Often mistakenly referred to as the Lost City of the Incas, it is the most familiar icon of Inca civilization.
The Incas built the estate around 1450 but abandoned it a century later at the time of the Spanish conquest. Although known locally, it was not known to the Spanish during the colonial period and remained generally unknown to the outside world until American historian Hiram Bingham brought it to international attention in 1911.
Machu Picchu was built in the classical Inca style, with polished dry-stone walls. Its three primary structures are the Intihuatana, the Temple of the Sun, and the Room of the Three Windows. Most of the outlying buildings have been reconstructed in order to give tourists a better idea of how they originally appeared. By 1976, 30% of Machu Picchu had been restored and restoration continues.
Machu Picchu was declared a Peruvian Historic Sanctuary in 1981 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.
More information: UNESCO
In 2007, Machu Picchu was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in a worldwide internet poll.
In the Quechua language, machu means old or old person, while pikchu means either portion of coca being chewed or pyramid, pointed multi-sided solid; cone. Thus, the name of the site is sometimes interpreted as old mountain.
Machu Picchu is believed by Richard L. Burger to have been built in the 1450s. Construction appears to date from two great Inca rulers, Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui (1438-1471) and Túpac Inca Yupanqui (1472-1493).
There is a consensus among archaeologists that Pachacutec ordered the construction of the royal estate for himself, most likely after a successful military campaign.
Though Machu Picchu is considered to be a royal estate, surprisingly, it would not have been passed down in the line of succession. Rather, it was used for 80 years before being abandoned, seemingly because of the Spanish Conquests in other parts of the Inca Empire. It is possible that most of its inhabitants died from smallpox introduced by travellers before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the area.
More information: Machu Picchu
The ruins of Machu Picchu are perched
on top of a steep ridge in the most inaccessible corner
of the most inaccessible section of the central Andes.
No part of the highlands of Peru has been better
defended by natural bulwarks -a stupendous canyon whose rim
is more than a mile above the river, whose rock is granite,
and whose precipices are frequently a thousand feet sheer.
Hiram Bingham III
