Machu Picchu.
An estate nobody wrote down.

Bingham’s expeditions opened about a hundred burial caves on the slopes and recovered the remains of some 170 people. In 2009 Turner and colleagues compared oxygen, strontium and lead isotopes in teeth and bone: the values scattered widely, the people had grown up in very different places and come to Machu Picchu only later. In 2023 a study in Science Advances produced genome-wide data for 34 of the buried: their origins stretch from the coast across the highlands into the Amazon lowlands, many had ancestors from several regions, and they were buried side by side.

This matches the yanacona of the chronicles, retainers whom the court drew from across the empire and bound to its estates. The people in the graves were not the lords of the place but those who kept it running: gardeners, craftsmen, cooks, guards. The court itself came and went with the seasons.

The chronicles have Pachacuti take the throne in 1438; the dating of Machu Picchu to the years around 1450 rested on that. In 2021 Burger, Salazar and colleagues published 26 AMS radiocarbon dates on bone and teeth from four cemeteries: use of the site begins around 1420 and ends around 1532. A Polish-Peruvian project reached a similar result with dates from Machu Picchu and the neighbouring sites of Chachabamba and Choquesuysuy.

Twenty years sound like little but shift the history of the empire: either Pachacuti came to power earlier than the chroniclers write, or the expansion into the Urubamba valley began under his predecessor. Here the dates from the ground weigh more than the years Spanish authors noted a century later from oral tradition.

Bingham saw in Machu Picchu in turn the Vilcabamba of the last Incas, the origin place Tampu Tocco and a convent of the Virgins of the Sun; the last reading he based on a supposed majority of female skeletons. In 1990 John Rowe showed from a 1568 file in Cusco that the lands of Picchu belonged to Pachacuti. Re-examination of the skeletons found a balanced sex ratio, and the buildings, guest houses, baths, a walled-off royal sector, resemble other royal estates such as Pisac and Ollantaytambo.

Estate does not mean secular: the Temple of the Sun, the Intihuatana and the alignment of several buildings on the solstices show that cult was part of the operation. The difference lies in the owner. A sanctuary belongs to a god, an estate to a lineage that kept farming it after the ruler’s death.

Machu Picchu means “old mountain” and is the name of the peak above the town; Bingham took it from his guides in 1911. In 2021 Donato Amado and Brian Bauer examined land titles, court records and maps from 1588 onwards. The ruins appear there as “Huayna Picchu”, young mountain, or simply as “Picchu”, named after the pointed peak at whose foot they lie. Bingham himself noted in 1911 that Melchor Arteaga spoke of ruins at Huayna Picchu.

The name under which the place became famous is probably a twentieth-century shift. That changes nothing about the stones, but it is a reminder of how much of what counts as certain comes from the notes of a single traveller.

On the day of his climb Bingham met farmers growing maize and potatoes on the terraces, and the charcoal inscription of Agustín Lizárraga from 1902. Peruvian maps named the place; tenants and treasure hunters knew it. What Bingham added was the survey, the photography and the publication. The finds his expeditions took to Yale on loan with Peru’s permission stayed there for almost a hundred years; after a lawsuit by Peru in 2008 the two sides agreed in 2010, and in 2011 and 2012 the objects returned to Cusco, where Yale and the University of San Antonio Abad care for them jointly.

The return has shifted the picture: Machu Picchu is now told less as the discovery of an American and more as a place that was never lost to its neighbours. At the Casa Concha in Cusco you see the returned pieces; at the ruins, the terraces where families lived in 1911.