Illuminating the Incas

When you walk into the ruins of the Inca retreat of Machu Picchu in Peru, the first sensation is of being overwhelmed. You want to sit and gaze, to make sure nothing of this astonishing scene escapes you.

Clouds huddle the Andes. The mountain Huayna Picchu rises above, ready to swat away anything that threatens. About 2,000 feet below you, the Urubamba River churns through a sliver of a canyon. Off to one side are terraces that once were filled with crops. Below is the magnificence of the ruins themselves, the granite houses, temples and palaces, the grassy plazas where llamas still graze.

If you can’t make it to Peru, the largest exhibit of Inca artifacts in this country will be at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County through Sept. 7. On display here since June 22, the exhibit is on its second stop on a tour that goes on to Pittsburgh, Denver, Houston and Chicago.

The first stop of “Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas” was the Yale Peabody Museum at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., which was only fitting, since most of the artifacts were stored there. Machu Picchu and Yale have had a long relationship, since professor Hiram Bingham hacked his way through the cloud forest in 1911 and discovered the ruins.

Bingham made three trips to Machu Picchu, taking thousands of photos, before giving up academia for politics and winning election as governor and senator from Connecticut. His camera, photos and letters are included in the exhibit.

The Inca empire lasted just a century or so, ending shortly after the Spanish arrived in Peru in 1532. They never made it to Machu Picchu. At its peak, the Inca territory stretched 3,500 miles, reaching from Ecuador to Chile, from the desert coast to the jungle.

The traveling exhibit is curated by Richard Burger, an anthropology professor at Yale and former director of the Peabody, and his wife, Lucy Salazar, a curatorial researcher at the museum. Their work has led to a renaissance of scientific investigation of the ruins, and a reevaluation of what it was.

After Bingham published his monograph in 1930, little research was done on the remote spot. As an undergraduate at Yale, Burger had asked a professor about doing research on the Bingham material. Don’t waste your time, the archeologist told him.

But Burger never forgot. A couple of years after he returned to Yale in 1981, Burger, along with Salazar, began looking at the pottery, tools and other artifacts Bingham had brought back, much of it still wrapped in newspapers from the 1920s. After three or four years, they even found the 105 burial sets of remains he had collected. “I felt like they were waiting for me,” Salazar said.

They analyzed the materials using modern technology and brought in other experts.

“It was incredibly exciting to see how much of this stuff had not been published by Bingham and how much there was to learn,” Burger said. “We had low expectations.”

Bingham argued that Machu Picchu was the refuge of the last Incas holding out against the Spanish, that it was the lost city of Vilcabamba. Others surmised it was a religious site.

But Burger, Salazar and others have determined that it was a retreat for the royal family, an Incan Camp David, just a three-day walk from Cuzco, then the empire’s capital. That’s a three-day walk for anyone but the Inca king, the son of the sun, who was carried on a litter.

While 85% of the exhibit material came from the Peabody, Salazar visited other museums looking for objects that would fit. She found a life-sized ear of corn cast in gold at the Mint Museum in North Carolina. At the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, she found a 3-foot-high arybalo, a classic Inca-style bottle with a cone-shaped base and a narrow neck, that held corn beer. It is decorated with spondylus shell, a spiny oyster the Incas believed was a favored food of the gods.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Karen Wise, the Natural History Museum curator in charge of Latin American archeology. “It’s quite extraordinary.”

Included in the exhibit is Bingham’s favorite piece, a 4-inch-long bronze knife that the explorer said in his monograph was lost. At one end is a carving of a fisherman wearing a hat that makes him look like a Smurf.

Another item that Burger points to is a solid silver plumb bob, about 1 1/2 inches in diameter, that was an Incan astronomical tool. Hung in a window, it casts a shadow that tells where the sun is moving.

Beneath it are boxes made of schist, a slate-colored rock. John Rowe, a UC Berkeley authority on Incas, has speculated it was used to catch the blood of sacrificed animals.

Two royal tunics in the exhibit are the only ones in existence, unless private collectors are hiding them. A black and brown one is made from vicuna wool. “Nobody alive could make something like this,” Wise said. “Not even the finest weavers in the highlands of Peru.”

The Peabody spent more than $1 million putting together the exhibit, which takes six tractor-trailers to haul. Along with the artifacts is a model of Machu Picchu, a re-creation of royal life and computer terminals that allow for self-guided tours of the ruins, narrated by scholars.

One thing you won’t find in the exhibit are the tons of gold that it was rumored Bingham took. The rumor probably cropped up because the explorer loaded his discoveries onto a ship at an isolated port, Burger said. A Peruvian commission cleared Bingham, Burger said, but people continued to denounce him.

“He couldn’t shake it,” Burger said. “It drove him crazy.”

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‘Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas’

Where: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 900 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles.

When: Weekdays, 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; weekends, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed July 4.

Ends: Sept. 7

Cost: $8, adults; $5.50, students/seniors; $2, children ages 5-12.

Info: (213) 763-DINO, www.nhm.org.