Hiram Bingham Did Not Discover Machu Picchu — A Local Farmer Walked Him to It

On the morning of July 24, 1911, the Yale historian Hiram Bingham III hired a local farmer named Melchor Arteaga for the price of a Peruvian sol — and a follow-up tip — to walk him up a path to a ruin a few of the locals knew about on a forested ridge above the Urubamba valley. Bingham was on a Yale-funded expedition looking for Vilcabamba, the lost final capital of the Inca resistance to Spanish rule. What Arteaga showed him was not Vilcabamba. It was Machu Picchu, an Inca royal estate built around 1450 and abandoned at the time of the Spanish conquest.

The popular framing has long been that Bingham "discovered" the site. He did not. Arteaga, an obscure but persistent Cusco rumor-mill, three earlier European visitors in the late 1800s, and the Peruvian explorer Agustín Lizárraga had all known about it. Lizárraga had reached the ruins in 1902 and signed his name in charcoal on the wall of a temple. Bingham noted the inscription in his original diary, then minimized it in subsequent published accounts. What he actually did was bring the site to international scientific attention through Yale and National Geographic, which devoted an entire April 1913 issue to the expedition.

The expedition also took. Bingham removed roughly 40,000 artifacts — bones, ceramics, metalwork — and shipped them to Yale's Peabody Museum, where they remained for nearly a century. Peru argued the items had been loaned, not given; Yale insisted otherwise. After a 2007 agreement and continuing pressure from the Peruvian government, Yale began returning the pieces in 2012. Bingham himself went on to a U.S. Senate seat in 1925, a political career that ended in censure for an irregular lobbying arrangement, and a posthumous role as the partial inspiration for Indiana Jones via the 1954 film Secret of the Incas.