Three Historians Support American’s Claim that Machu Picchu was Looted Before Hiram Bingham

The Search For the Treasure

By Enrique Sanchez Hernani

SOMOS (El Comercio)

June 28, 2008

(translated by Kim MacQuarrie)

Vestiges. Documents that could confirm the discovery of Machu Picchu by a German adventurer a half century before Hiram Bingham, reveal new evidence about the monumental looting.

In the beginning of June, news shook scientific and historical circles: the German dealer August R. Berns had carried away the majority of the archaeological remains at Machu Picchu 44 years before Bingham arrived in this country…

According to what two of the subject’s investigators revealed to SOMOS, Berns was not the only treasure hunter at the Inca citadel. Yet despite stiff competition from other European fortune hunters, all unscrupulous businessmen like himself, Berns’ advantage was that he had the approval of the [Peruvian] governments of Jose Balta and Andres Avelino Cáceres for the systematic looting of our patrimony. Part of this treasure could have belonged to the collection of the Peruvian, Jose Macedo, who took it to Paris and then sold it in Berlin, the last known trace of the gold of the Incas.

In this edition, documents are published for the first time that will help prove this and other surprising facts, because a prominent member of the company that exploited these treasures was none other than the [Peruvian] folklorist, Ricardo Palma. And what does the National Institute of Culture (INC) think about all of this? No civil servant has wanted to go on record and it would appear that, because of ignorance and laziness, that they haven’t even prepared a partial action plan that would involve, to begin with, a listing of all that was robbed.

Paolo Greer is an American geographer and cartographer who has excited Peruvian scientific circles with his recent discoveries. Greer discovered that a German company appeared in Cuzco in 1867, controlled by a sawmill operation located in what is now Aguas Calientes, that made railway ties for the Cusco-Quillabamba-Puno railway. August R. Berns, a civil engineer of the Thorndike company, which had the concession for the railway, worked for the sawmill. After tracking down documents for more than ten years, Greer discovered in the National Library of Lima his first old map, by a Hermán Góhring, that dated from 1874. Here appeared for the first time the word Machu Picchu. (The map, created by Hermán Góhring, appeared in Machu Picchu and the Code of Ethics of the American Archaeological Society, written by Mariana Mould de Pease, [and published] in the year 2003. The book covers the historical context in which Hiram Bingham retrieved treasures from Machu Picchu, but does not mention the existence of a previous expedition led by the German Berns at the same time the map was created).

In a North American library, Greer discovered the drawing of a certain Harry Singer that dated from the decade of 1870, and a map of Berns, whose date of creation Greer calculates to be somewhere between 1867 and 1887. The Singer map portrays the opposite side of the Vilcanota River from Machu Picchu. Greer also discovered that Berns had begun working in the area in 1867, as an official inspector of Peruvian government mines, but that he was not a partner in the company, the partner being Singer. The latter failed with his sawmill, after which he became the Regional Inspector of Departmental Roads, for which reason he remained a long time in Peru, becoming the owner of the lands and property described in his drawing.

Greer arrived for the first time in Cusco in 1974. He found the first unpublished map in 1978. Greer worked in the National Library of Peru from 1989, in the Library of the University of Yale and the Library of the Congress in Washington from 1978, and in the Library of the University of Fresno in California, among others. He came a few months almost every year to work in Peru and eventually in Bolivia.

The Looting of the Idols

Greer has a scientific team in Peru comprised by Carlos Carcelén, an historian at the University of San Marcos; Alain Gioda, an historian, geographer and French climatologist; and Alex Chespow-Lusty, a British historian at the Center of BioArchaeology and Ecology at Montepellier, who resides in Cusco. Carcelén and Gioda were interviewed by SOMOS.

According to the evidence gathered by the team, Machu Picchu may have received other European visits before Berns. It’s known that in the 16th century, Spanish Agustinian priests knew about the area, establishing The Picchu Doctrine, with the purpose of catechizing the natives in the area. The Augustinians eventually bought those lands, controlling the area for almost a century. According to Carcelén and Gioda, it’s very possible that these same Augustinians visited Machu Picchu, because during those centuries the extirpation of idolatries took place, whose mission was to look for [native] idols and ruins in order to sack them and to destroy the idols. Paolo Greer, delving deeper into this subject, eventually discovered that after the sawmill dedicated to [fabricating] railway ties, a Company for the Exploitation of Incan Idols & Ruins was formed in 1887.

“During those twenty years,” stated Carcelén and Gioda, “Berns and his partners were informed about all the archaeological remains in the area, and they not only knew about them but also removed objects from there.” This is demonstrated by the existence of a catalogue that Greer was able to examine in a North American library. The document was published in Paris in 1881 by one of Berns’ partners, whose objective was to sell pieces that had been extracted from the area. This catalogue was to be circulated among businessmen and foreign academics and contained everything from ceramics and textiles to metal objects. It’s necessary to remember, Carcelén and Gioda add, that the ethics of archaeology at the time (until 1910-11) were based on removing any material that was found. Only with the [1922] discovery of the tomb of Tutamkamon, in Egypt, did [field] research acquire a scientific look.

Berns, nevertheless, did not have everything go his way. He was denounced by a certain Christian Dam as a swindler who kept the money from the shareholders without putting together the agreed-upon expedition. The [Christian Dam] letter took up an entire page in the May 1888 edition of El Comericio. This may be owed, reasons Gioda, to the fact that other German and American explorers were also looking for gold and treasures in the same area, thus competing with Berns.

The Partner Ricardo Palma

How did Berns manage to take the [Inca] pieces to Europe? By relying upon a Supreme Resolution of the government of Andres A. Cáceres (president between 1886 and 1890), Berns put together an official expedition and arrived at Machu Picchu. In return, his company paid a tax, more or less like a mining concession. President Cáceres’ government decree, authorizing the activities of the Company of the Inca Idols, was published in the Nov 23, 1887 edition of El Comercio. But Carcelén and Gioda think that Berns had already been to the place [Machu Picchu] by1867 and that it’s probable that between this date and 1870 he had worked there, thanks to an authorization issued by the government of Jose Balta (the President [of Peru] between 1868-1872).

Together with Berns and Macedo appear the partners of the Inca Idols Company: Fernando Umlauff, Jose Rufino Macedo, Luis Carranza, the folklorist Ricardo Palm, Luis Esteves, David Matto, Francisco L. Crosby, Jacobo Bakus and Arnaldo Hilfiker. These were very important Peruvians and German businessmen of the time. The document that reveals the partnership is printed with the signature, “The Nacional,” on 139 Melchormalo Street, in 1887. An original [copy] can be found in the National Library of Lima.

Sometime before forming his company, Berns had obtained the position of Colonel of the Peruvian Army Reserve, a title that he used to present himself with in the United States. The peculiar thing about it is that the incorporation document of Berns’ company, a German adventurer bereft of any major academic education, contained a meticulous amount of historical information, with a detailed and precise knowledge of our [Peruvian] history and our [Spanish] chroniclers.

This makes Carcelén and Gioda think that it was [Ricardo] Palma who wrote it. Palma had become involved with these people because he was a very pure liberal and was in contact with liberal businessmen. “It’s impossible that these historical details were known to a German adventurer, the two historians said, “because Palma was the only one among all the partners who had a very good knowledge of Peruvian history.” Palma was Director of the National Library until 1883. “Palma provided the historical justification for the adventure,” they concluded, “as he was the only well-educated partner.”

Treasure in Berlin

Many of the things that were sold in 1887 by Macedo can now be tracked in Germany in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. Carcelén and Gioda affirm that “we have been in contact with the curator of the museum who is in charge of the South American Department, and she told us that the objects in the collection are registered from 1887 onwards.” What cannot be precisely determined is whether the entire collection of more than a thousand pieces belongs to that epoch. “What seems strange to us,” they stated, “is that many people have had this information but have never made it known in the Peruvian media.” This could have happened, speculate the two scholars, because when Bingham arrived at Machu Picchu he decided to forget the past, because his was the first academic expedition, since Berns’ was purely commercial. Even so, he [Bingham] would only have found “debris” left by Berns.

While Peru has made a great fuss trying to get the University of Yale to return the several hundreds of [Bingham’s] pieces that it has had in its power since 1912–a lawsuit in which The National Geographic has been added this week, present in negotiations in which it has always spoken of “a loan that had to be returned”—Greer’s team of investigators thinks that the treasures that Machu Picchu guarded revolved around what, in their opinion, was the truth about the citadel: that it was the mausoleum of the Inca [emperor] Pachacutec. Greer cites this thesis directly from the chronicle of Juan Diez de Betanzos, a Spaniard who in the 16th century had access to privileged information from the relatives of his wife, an Inca princess. Machu Picchu would have been what the old cronistas describe as “houses of Inca mummies,” located in the Urubamba Valley, and surrounded by objects of gold and silver. This gives an idea of the archaeological treasure lost during those turbulent years.

(Next: An Interview With Paolo Greer)