Kim MacQuarrie’s Peru & South America Blog
Hiram Bingham at Machu Picchu in 1912
Bingham Didn’t Dig Up The Yale Huacos –He Just Bought Them
August 6, 2009
Caretas
By Nicholas Asheshov
Here in Urubamba Hiram Bingham’s reputation has taken a knock in the run-up to the centennial of the discovery in 1911 of Machu Picchu.
The revisionists are saying that Bingham was not just a persistent explorer but also, frankly, a humbug.
Bingham’s economical use of the truth has been compounded by the poorly-advised refusal of Yale University and its Peabody Museum of Natural History to return, as promised, what Bingham’s Yale expeditions dug up in the Vilcabamba 1912-15.
The Peruvian government is taking Yale to court but they’re not pushing it.
Here’s why. None of the good pieces in the Yale Machu Picchu collection were actually dug up by Yale archaeologists.
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Native Protestors at the entrance of Yurimagua, in the northern Peruvian Amazon
Blood at the Blockade: Peru’s Indigenous Uprising
NACLA (May-June 2009)
Gerardo Rénique
On June 6, near a stretch of highway known as the Devil’s Curve in the northern Peruvian Amazon, police began firing live rounds into a multitude of indigenous protestors – many wearing feathered crowns and carrying spears. In the nearby towns of Bagua Grande, Bagua Chica, and Utcubamba, shots also came from police snipers on rooftops, and from a helicopter that hovered above the mass of people. Both natives and mestizos took to the streets protesting the bloody repression.
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(Above: The Torreón at Machu Picchu is a tower built around a stone that still has a carved groove in it. Once a year, the groove is illuminated as the rising sun shines through one window each June solstice. The window also frames the Pleiades constellation, which was used by the Incas to decide when to plant potatoes. At its height in the early 16th century, the Incas’ 2,500-mile-long empire was littered with celestial observatories, which aided the Incas in the precise sowing and reaping of various crops–KM).
When the Sun Hits the White Granite Boulder, it’s the Solstice
By Nicholas Asheshov
Caretas
On June 21, just over a week from now, the winter solstice, easily the most important day in the ancient Andes, falls due and brilliant rays of sun will be flooding just after dawn through carefully-designed Inca windows onto sharp once-a-year marker stones…
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