What I Am Reading: "Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, A Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu" by Christopher Heaney

One of the main considerations for my comparatively heavy reading schedule is its use as a way to mark time during my hopefully-temporary stay in New Jersey. It appears, however, that I was also marking time until the epoch-defining 2020 election; and in its aftermath, I have (at least temporarily) lost some of my motivation to hit the books. I've given myself a fairly feel-good itinerary for the rest of the month, and I expect for things to pick back up after that, once the list is rejuvenated a bit.

Another possible explanation is that I've caught a bit of a writing bug this autumn, and a lot of my free time has gone to that and to the necessary historical research. I read this book as research for some of that writing, a paper I am working on about its subject, Hiram Bingham III. The fact that I already intend to write about it once, combined with the fact that my computer rebooted and brought my (unsaved, as usual) notes for this blog post down with it to its watery grave, means that I am going to keep it fairly short in this blog post, by the standards of my usual summaries.

Hiram Bingham III was the man responsible for the scientific discovery of Machu Picchu; in other words, though some locals and some Peruvian scholars knew that it was there, he was the one who first brought it to wider and more systematic scientific attention. As you can tell already, this story is fraught with old-school archaeological imperialism and racism. The author, Christopher Heaney, a former Yale student (Bingham's alma mater and sponsor) who is very sympathetic to Peruvian concerns in the long-running controversy over Machu Picchu artifacts, puts it best toward the end when he says that "beyond that inspired 1911 expedition... he proved more dreamer than scholar. He heralded the start of large-scale excavation in Peru and established an extremely useful classification scheme of Inca pottery, but his academic reputation has seriously diminished compared to that of his contemporaries, like Lax Uhle and Julio C. Tello." (p. 126).

Bingham was the third-generation son of American missionaries who ministered to indigenous people in Hawai'i and the Gilbert Islands. Looking for a wider world based on his readings, he was eventually allowed to go to school on the mainland United States, and attended Yale in the late 1890s. Here, he went back and forth between his religious calling and a more modern, cosmopolitan life as a scholar, causing his parents great angst through his haughty rejections of their world view. One of the interesting turning points of his life, in my opinion, comes in 1898, when he considers and rejects the idea of enlisting with the Rough Riders, as some of his classmates did, to fight in the Spanish-American War. I personally think, as an armchair analyst, that a considerable amount of Bingham's eventual restlessness and striving came from an attempt to make up for his failure to stand with his cohort in their generation-defining event.

His career was definitely impacted by America's era of jingoistic overseas expansion, as he came to the possibility of dedicating his studies to Latin America, a vastly under-explored topic that Heaney says he was a decade too early for: after he completed his Masters (partially planarized) and PhD (in 1905), there was no ready-made academic job waiting for him. He first escaped the academic backwaters with a brief expedition into the Columbian and Venezuelan interior to re-create the march of Bolívar's army for a biography he was writing. This trip, in 1906-7, bettered his prospects, and he was chosen in 1908 as a delegate to the Pan-American Scientific Congress. Prior to his arrival at the conference in Chile, he traveled the continent, including a near-miss, unremarkable at the time but interesting in hindsight, of two American bandits killed in Argentina whom some scholars (and a filmmaker, of course) believe were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The trip was more important, however, because of a last-minute diversion that brought Bingham to see Inca ruins in Peru. The impressiveness and unknown quality of these ruins captured his imagination, and he targeted this as a next area of study. His brief studies here brought him more acclaim, as he appeared to have discovered, or at least charted, the lost city of Choqquequirau. He was resultingly able to secure a real professorship at Yale and organize a well-funded Yale expedition to Peru in 1911.

The objective of this expedition was to find the last refuges of the Inca in the face of Spanish conquest, the Vitcos and Vilcabamba of Manco Inca, the rebel king who retreated into the Andes, and his children Titu Cusi and Tupac Amaru, who were eventually defeated after a few decades of isolation. The book covers these stories, and it also covers the story of Peru in Bingham's time. The country started to become aware of its indigenous heritage in the face of control from the white, colonist elite in Lima and the power of foreign companies, who had gained considerable holdings in the country after its guano bust a few decades earlier. Many of the leaders of the Indigenismo movement came from Cuzco, the old Inca city that was a backwater in Bingham's time, but increasingly the site of activism by the living descendants of the Inca to reclaim their heritage.

I love a good archive chase more than almost anything, and Bingham undergoes one as he used the notes of centuries of explorers, as well as old Spanish chronicles, to sort out the hidden identities of Vitcos and Vilcabamba through records of their alleged placements and changing names. He also pumped locals for oral history and knowledge of ruin sites. It is during this expedition that he discovered Machu Picchu, quite by accident, though he recognized the grandeur and importance of the ruin. Fortunately for Bingham, he had a tendency to humor any side-tracks that came his way during his primary exploration.

Bingham's later studies led him to believe first that Machu Picchu was the oldest, original Inca settlement, and then that it was also Vilcabamba, the last free Inca settlement wiped out by the Spanish; thus both the beginning and the end of the Inca empire. He was wrong. He in fact, in his additional travels, found both Vitcos, which he did recognize as an Inca power seat, and Vilcabamba, which he did not. Vilcabamba was an overgrown jungle ruin where indigenous people still lived, many of whom sought refuge there from oppressive plantation landowners in the region. Bingham did not recognize this connection, did not see the living history in front of him, and thought the ruins grimy and useless.

Bingham benefitted from the big “discovery” of Machu Picchu, which was a major sensation at the time (and is of course a major archaeological and heritage site today). This was his peak as an explorer. He completed a survey of the site, and took some artifacts away with him. Artifacts, however, would be his undoing. His next expedition, imbued with high hopes by all parties involved, was cut short when the new, more radical Peruvian government cracked down on widespread looting, and rejected the sweetheart, exclusive deal that Yale had negotiated with the previous government. Bingham did get to keep the artifacts and human remains that his team had excavated, and was also driven to illegally purchase some looted collections, with which to make Yale's museum. The items he acquired from Machu Picchu were only considered loans by the Peruvian government, in a clause Bingham agreed to but didn't trumpet. Bingham's foreshortened expedition (and the next one, forthcoming), raised some eyebrows in the academic and popular communities, though he still had a lot of popular support in this era of exploration.

Another expedition, in 1915, would be Bingham's last; the Peruvian government shut him down after it discovered that he was excavating where he shouldn't be. Local historical officials, as per a new law, were assigned to follow his work, and presented copious evidence of these unauthorized digs. They didn’t find out about his past smuggling, but they did investigate his packaged findings, which he had intended to swindle the Peruvian government out of despite their partial ownership claims. There was a hearing to prove this, but the jury didn’t quite understand the archaeological importance of the mundane artifacts and human remains that Bingham was taking away, as they expected to see treasures of gold and silver. Though the hammer of law never fell on him, he was under enough suspicion and investigation for the expedition to be cut short.

Nevertheless, he had swindled customs inspections many times, smuggled out artifacts that had almost been lost in transit, and had either kept or been responsible for the keeping of slapdash records that later rendered many items bereft of their archaeological context: a disservice to scholars. He evinced racist attitudes toward the natives he did encounter; my supposition is that he largely viewed them as distinct from the grand Inca of yore, and also that he, growing up in the Spanish-American War milieu where "among Anglo-Americans the Black Legend of the Spanish - that they were supposedly savage, benighted, superstitious, and lazy - was infamous" (p. 19), perhaps looked down on Hispanic people most of all. Bingham did a lot of sketchy stuff, and was definitely a figure of his unpleasant time. He was tall, thin-lipped, Puritanical from his missionary upbringing. He was the sort of person who vigorously quoted the motto of his Ivy League college. He went on, naturally, to be a Republican Senator.

The book is mainly about the Machu Picchu aspect of Bingham's life and career. It provides good coverage of how indigenous activists and local Cuzco intellectuals, such as historian and activist Luis Valcárcel (who argued against Bingham in the abovementioned hearing), musicologist Daniel Alomía Robles (ditto), or archaeologist Julio C. Tello (turned away from Bingham's academic headquarters for his dark skin) who did the work uncovering and crusading against Bingham's violations of the nation's new and hard-fought heritage laws. These are the real heroes of the story, though Heaney acknowledges the importance of Bingham's discoveries. The defense of Machu Picchu was a catalyzing event in Peru’s long and ongoing legal and enforcement battle against looters.

Though they all made peace in the end (despite continued revelations of damaged or un-accounted-for artifacts), and Bingham is acknowledged heavily at Machu Picchu today apparently, the fight is a great example of a battle over archaeological politics and how the memory of such a battle can linger. The opinions of such indigenous intellectuals weren't much reflected in the American press at the time, but they were important to Peru's cultural history. This book was published a decade ago, but at that time, the Machu Picchu artifacts at Yale still hadn’t been returned. In the years since, however, Yale has begun the process of returning them, apparently surrendering in their rearguard action of legal ownership and cultural superiority.