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For
years the site of Machu Picchu lay forgotten, except by local Indians
and settlers, until it was discovered
by
the North American explorer Hiram Bingham, who on July 24 1911
accompanied by a local settler who knew of some ruins, came upon a
previously unheard of Inka citadel which was to become the most famous
ruin in South American. Bingham’s reconstruction of the inkas past,
Machu Picchu
fell into place as
Vilcabamba the site of the last refuge from the Spanish
Conquistadors. Not another American expedition surveyed the ruins around
Machu Picchu in the 1940 did serious doubts begin to arise over this
assignation, and more recently the site of the Inka’s
final stronghold has been shown to be Espiritu Pampa, beyond
Quillabamba in the Amazon
jungle Meanwhile, Machu Picchu began to be reconsidered for what it is, perhaps the best preserved of a whole series of agricultural center which served Cusco in its Prime, the city was probably conceived, and maybe even partly built, in the fifteenth century bay the Emperor Pachacuti, the first to expand the imperial beyond the Sacred Valley towards the forested gold-lands. With crop fertility, mountains and nature so sacred to the Inkas, an agricultural center as important as nature so Machu Picchu would easily have merited the site’s fine stonework and temple precincts. Even if Machu Picchu has lost its original claim to fame, none of its characteristic mystique has gone.
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