via BBC News, June 6, 2008
Machu Picchu ruin 'found earlier'
A team of historians says the lost city of the Incas, Machu Picchu, in Peru was discovered more than 40 years earlier than previously thought and ransacked.
Machu Picchu, now Peru's biggest tourist attraction, was famously believed to have been discovered in 1911 by US explorer Hiram Bingham.
The ruins are the crown jewel of Peru's archaeological sites in Peru and draw thousands of tourists every day.
Machu Pichu carries symbolic value for Peru's indigenous people.
It was built by one of the last Inca emperors, Pachacutec, in around 1450 and kept secret from the Spanish conquerors who invaded about 100 years later.
Now the story about its discovery by the western world has been shaken up by a team of historians who say a German businessman looted its treasures more than 40 years before.
They say the adventurer, Augusto Berns, who traded in Peru's wood and gold, raided the citadel's tombs in 1867 apparently with the blessing of the Peruvian government.
He had set up a sawmill at the foot of the forested mountain on which Machu Picchu stands and systematically robbed precious artefacts which he sold to European galleries and museums.
Only when one of the historians found a map in Peru's national museum were his activities traced.
Until now it has been believed that Hiram Bingham, an American academic from Yale University, brought the Inca city to the attention of the world in 1911, although local people clearly already knew of its presence.
Mr Berns had a far less noble objective and researchers are now trying to find out how many artefacts he spirited out of the country at a time when there were no known archaeological expeditions in Peru.
Sadly more than a century later, Peruvian archaeological treasures are still being looted by grave robbers and sold on the international black market.
The idea that A.R. Berns looted Machu Picchu in the 19th century is not true. There is no evidence to support the suggestion that Berns even jnew about or set foot in the archaeological ruin, let alone looted it.
Berns set up a stock company, "Huacas del Inca," in Peru in 1887 (the 1867 date in some stories is an error) with the purported goal of searching for Inca treasure, but no evidence has been presented to date — other than unbridled speculation, which only Baron Von Munchausen considers evidence — that he ever even turned a spade. Berns seemed more interested in the treasures in his investors’ pockets.
Berns had launched another company a few years earlier, in 1881, soliciting investments in a gold and mining venture on Torontoy, a property in Peru that he claimed had more such precious metals that any other site in the world. Nothing came of that venture either.
A gold mine is a hole in the ground atop which stands a liar — attributed to Mark Twain -- the liar in this case would be A.R. Berns.
On the larger question -- discovery -- Hiram Bingham is justifiably famed as the "scientific discoverer" of Machu Picchu, that is, he encountered, excavated, photographed, studied, and made known to the outside world the ruins known today as Machu Picchu.
The site was never completely unknown. Peruvian historians have found records of the ruins' existence going back to the 16th century. One might argue that it was never absolutely abandoned. So even if Berns visited the site in 1887 -- and there's no evidence that he did -- he's at the tail end of a long line that stretches back to the 1500s.
Dan Buck
Posted by: Daniel Buck | July 25, 2008 at 07:46 AM
Last Sunday, 8/31, La Republica in Lima published my op-ed about the Berns controversy. Below is the original essay, in English. The La Republica translation -- available on its website -- is a bit different, though the gist is the same.
Dan
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Machu Picchu: Known and Unknown, There and Not There
By Daniel Buck
Mention the phrase "Lost City of the Incas" or "Inca treasure" and normally skeptical journalists drop their guard and credulously report the most unfounded speculations.
Earlier this year, the media worldwide reported that Machu Picchu had been discovered by Augusto R. Berns decades before Hiram Bingham III arrived there in 1911. Some of the stories even suggested that Berns, a German engineer and adventurer who had lived in Peru periodically during the second half of the 19th century, had looted the Inca site. One account said that "Bernsse había cargado en peso la mayoría de los vestigios arqueológicos de Machu Picchu."
The media reports were sparked by speculations from Paolo Greer, a researcher and explorer from Alaska who visits Peru frequently.
There are only two problems with Greer's announcements and the news stories. First, there has been no evidence presented to date that Berns even knew of Machu Picchu's existence, let alone that he visited or looted the site. Second, even if he had visited Machu Picchu in the late 1880s, countless others had preceded him. In any event, since he left no record of any such visit, he discovered nothing.
What Bingham accomplished was entirely distinct. During three expeditions between 1911 and 1915, Bingham excavated, photographed, studied, and made known to the world Machu Picchu. There can be no doubt that Bingham is the site's "scientific discoverer," an honorific bestowed on the Yale professor by José Gabriel Cosío, a Cuzco academic and official delegate to Bingham's second expedition.
It is also true that others had known of the ruins long before Bingham. One can make the case that Machu Picchu was never totally lost. It was periodically known and unknown, there and not there -- visited, lived in, farmed, and even bought and sold – from the 16th century until Bingham permanently removed it from obscurity.
In Urubamba: Benemérita Ciudad y Provincia Arqueológica del Perú (2007), Leandro Zans Candia summarizes colonial and republican era citations to Machu Picchu compiled by several Peruvian historians. But the site's archaeological importance was long ignored, its natural beauty unappreciated. Cosío, writing in the Boletin de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima in 1912, put it succinctly: "No es verdad que el doctor Bingham haya sido el descubridor de los restos; él les ha dado la vida de la fama y del interés arqueológico."
Bingham was, if anything, a determined explorer. He combed archives, interviewed scholars, collected maps, and queried locals. He already knew about Machu Picchu before he headed down the Urubamba Valley. Yes, it's true that he was not always generous in crediting those who had assisted him. Like many explorers, Bingham had a large ego, a desire for fame, and sharp elbows.
So who was Augusto R. Berns and what does he have to do with Machu Picchu? He apparently – almost everything said about Berns has to be preceded by the word "apparently" because he was a congenital liar, a Baron Munchausen, a fantastist with an engineering degree, which is to say, apparently with an engineering degree. He said that he was born in Germany in 1842 and first came to Peru in the 1860s, and that he had worked on the Southern Peruvian Railway, and later for the Peruvian military. In the late 1870s and early 1880s he said he was outside Peru, chiefly in the United States.
In 1881, while living in Michigan, he organized the first of two enterprises that could more accurately be called swindles, "The Torontoy or Cercada-de-San Antonio Estate in Southern Peru." Berns mailed potential investors a letter, map, and prospectus, claiming that his property in the Urubamba Valley (across the river from the as yet undiscovered Machu Picchu) was in an area that, if developed, would be "universally recognized as the greatest gold and silver producing centre in the world." He declared that there was gold everywhere at Torontoy, loose in the ground and the sand, and in veins in the rocks, clay, and slate. He said that there was an ‘ancient gold-washing apparatus"cut out of solid rock, called "Llamajcansha," which "in the ancient Indian language, means ‘Gold Yard.'" It is unlikely the readers of his prospectus in the United States spoke Quechua, otherwise they would have figured out that Llamajcansha meant "llama yard." Berns was selling a load of llama dung.
Also on his property, near Llamajcansha, there was "said to be," Berns hinted, a tunnel, which, he further hinted, "there is reason to believe "was"used as a tomb to receive embalmed bodies of the Incas," as well as their ornaments. On his map, he marked the tunnel "Huacas del Inca."
In a letter to investors, written from Detroit, Michigan, Berns said that anything "less than $5,000,000 actual cash [dollars] would be inadequate "to develop Torontoy. Five million dollars in today's currency would be more than 100 million dollars. It is not known what became of his swindle, or if he raised a single penny.
At some point Berns returned to Peru, and in 1887 organized another scheme,a stock company called, coincidentally, "Huacas del Inca." The company's 48-page prospectus is Indiana Jones mumbo-jumbo, suggesting that there are unimaginable treasures waiting to be plundered: "las riquísimas y valiosísimas obras de arte" that "adoraban los templos y edifícios públicos y reales de la metrópoli imperio Incasio."
Specifically, the "Huacas del Inca" would be launching expeditions to search for the fabled lost treasure of the Incas,that portion of the Atahualpa ransom that had evaded the Spaniards. Berns told his investors that the "mitad por lo ménos, fué levada consigo por losindios, segun lo consigna la historia, á las montañas inmediatas al Cuzco,ósea las de Paucartambo, Lares y Santa Ana."
If Atahualpa's ransom was not sufficient to impress gullible investors,the company's organizers compared themselves to Columbus and Galileo.
What ultimately happened to "Huacas del Inca" is not known, but in 1888 its vice-president publicly resigned, accusing Berns of having misappropriated funds for personal use and, worse, of failing to launch a single expedition.
Nowhere in any of the materials made public to date about Augusto R. Bernsis there any evidence that he knew about, visited, intended to loot, or did loot Machu Picchu. In a recent post on the science history blog, Archaeorama, blogs.discovery.com, even Paolo Greer conceded that there is no real evidence that Berns ever set foot on Machu Picchu. Even if he did, he's in a long line of visitors that started centuries ago.
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Daniel Buck is free-lance writer residing in Washington, D.C.. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Department of Puno, 1966-67.
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Posted by: Daniel Buck | September 05, 2008 at 01:36 PM