Machu Picchu: A lost city is found....................~Wise

Machu Picchu: A lost city is found By EILEEN McCLELLAND Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

WHAT once was known as a lost city might today be described more accurately as an Inca Camp David.

Stone outcrops were used as foundations in the construction of Machu Picchu, which is surrounded by sacred mountains. Ninety-seven years after the discovery of Machu Picchu in the Andes, the site continues to reveal its centuries-old secrets.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science is presenting Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas exhibit from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History through Sept. 6.

"It's the best possible alternative to going there," says Dirk Van Tuerenhout, curator of anthropology, who has visited the site in Peru.

Visitors will learn in an introductory film that the pre-Columbian ruin was virtually intact — though swallowed by the jungle — when Peruvian farmers revealed it to Yale historian Hiram Bingham III and his expedition team on July 24, 1911.

Early investigators suggested that Machu Picchu might have been the birthplace of Inca culture or perhaps served as a destination for the emperor and 300 sun maidens.

"Hiram Bingham went to Peru looking for a place where the Incas had made a last stand against the Spanish," Tuerenhout says. "He had read that the Inca did not just give up. He went there and asked, 'Where are the ruins?'"

So the local farmers led him to the grand ruins of Machu Picchu.

Black-and-white photographs from Bingham's expeditions are on display as well as memorabilia from his expeditions, including his Kodak cameras and a 1911 notebook recording the discovery.

A gold figurine of a female was found on the grounds of Machu Picchu. In the 1990s, Yale scientists re-examined human bones found at the site and changed their original perspective. Tuerenhout says the 1,234-acre Machu Picchu was built for Pachacuti, the first ruler of the Inca Empire, as a vacation retreat.

"Dead people do tell tales. The skeletal material showed the population consisted of men and women and old as well as young," Tuerenhout says. The people buried at Machu Picchu were not Inca rulers, but caretakers, metalworkers and other specialized craftspeople apparently recruited from among the people the Inca had conquered.

The Inca people numbered about 100,000 and ruled more than 15 million people from dozens of ethnic groups throughout modern Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Peru.

Only one gold item — an Inca bracelet found in the 1990s — has ever been found at Machu Picchu. Instead, practical items like pottery were found.

"These were the burials of people who were middle class or lower," Tuerenhout says.

If Machu Picchu had been an Inca city, gold would have been plentiful. Since it was a royal retreat, the Inca rulers left their gold safely at home when they visited, anthropologists have concluded.

Such discoveries are what archaeology and anthropology in the 21st century are all about, Tuerenhout says.

"It's no longer a treasure hunt in the style of Indiana Jones, where a guy says, 'I work for a university, so I can go steal some treasures.' That's not the ethics anymore. Objects are cool, but today it's more about 'What was the culture like? What were the people like?' "

Objects on display include stone carvings, carved wooden beakers used for ritual drinking of corn beer, ceremonial bronze knives, a silver bracelet and shawl pin, and burial-cave objects, including ceramic jars. Also exhibited are Inca textiles and gold objects from other sites.

Other popular features of the exhibit are virtual-reality computer tours of Machu Picchu and a children's area that includes an archaeological dig area.

"More and more these days, exhibits are a combination of objects and commentary using state-of-the-art technology," Tuerenhout says. "That's the goal in a sense, to convey a feeling for the site and to imagine what it would be like to step back in time and to experience a different world altogether."

Tuerenhout says that although the Inca civilization was destroyed by Old World diseases — smallpox, measles, typhus, pneumonia, plague and scarlet fever — and war with Spanish invaders, the culture did not disappear.

"In the end, millions of people survived who were still using the language," he says. "They carried with them a part of the culture. People still speak modern Inca."

Machu Picchu has more secrets to share as scientific techniques evolve. Eventually, scholars will release reports about where exactly the residents of Machu Picchu were born, and what, exactly, they ate.

"That's what DNA can do these days," Tuerenhout says.

Machu Picchu

Where: Houston Museum of Natural Science, 1 Hermann Circle in Hermann Park.

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