Paper short abstract:

In 1911, Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham claimed that his Quechua workmen were unrelated to the noble Inca Empire. 100 years later, the Peruvian government demanded that Yale return the artifacts given Peru’s Inca heritage, demonstrating how Bingham’s expedition and the removal of Machu Picchu’s history sparked debates around a modern Inca identity.

Paper long abstract:

Yale University Professor Hiram Bingham’s discovery of Machu Picchu in 1911 spurred an international interest in the Inca Empire, and with it, a dispute with the Peruvian government over who had rightful jurisdiction and curatorship over Inca history. By 2011, the Peruvian government initiated a legal battle for the return of artifacts that Bingham had removed from Machu Picchu, successfully returning them not to the site of Machu Picchu, but to Cusco, employing the rationale that the ancient Inca capital housed descendent citizens of the Inca empire. This conflation of the past and present can be traced to a largely unanalyzed study that accompanied Bingham’s expedition: an ethnographic study of Inca descendants, which at the time marketed indigenous Peruvian Andean peoples as remnants of a lost civilization, using Cusco as an assumed repository for people with “Inca” characteristics. This study draws from the original Yale Peruvian Expedition archives, the Cusco newspaper library archives, and in-depth interviews with curators of the Inca Museum and Machu Picchu Museum to analyze the intellectual and political conflict that emerged as a reaction to the ethnographic study, and how the study articulated with an inflating tourism market attempting to define what it meant to be Inca to an international public. The construction of the modern Inca as both directors of tourism management and purveyors of their archaeological material culture points to a unique case in which modern Peruvian citizens could claim heritage to an Inca past despite a lack of recognition as a legally defined group. The result has far-reaching implications, since Bingham’s artifacts returned not necessarily to a traditional nation state, but to an imagined one, broadening the conditions under which informal repatriations can occur.

Key Words

Archaeology of Memory, Imagined Communities, Incanismo, Repatriation