Plunder or politics? Clash on Inca artifacts

By any conventional measure, Yale's exhibition about Machu Picchu would seem a windfall for Peru. As one of the most ambitious shows about the Inca ever presented in the United States, drawing over a million visitors while traveling to half a dozen cities and back again, it has riveted eyes on Peru's leading tourist attraction.

Yet instead of cementing an international partnership, the exhibition, which returned to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale in September, has brought a low ebb in the university's relations with Peru. At issue are a large group of artifacts that form the core of the show, excavated at Machu Picchu in a historic dig by a Yale explorer in 1912. The government of Peru wants all of those objects back.

Peru contends that it essentially lent the Machu Picchu objects to the university nearly a century ago and that the university has failed to return them. Yale has staunchly rebuffed Peru's claim, stating that it returned all borrowed objects in the 1920s and has retained only those to which it has full title.

The dispute is inflamed by the swashbuckling exploits of Hiram Bingham 3rd, a Yale professor, aviator and later senator, and the special dispensations he brokered with the Peruvian government to take Inca bones and ritual tomb objects out of Peru. Add a Peruvian president who has made the country's indigenous heritage a central theme of his administration and an Ivy League archaeology department with a towering reputation in the Inca field, and the dispute has all the ingredients of an Indiana Jones movie.

"The irony is that for years the collection was just left in cardboard boxes," said Hugh Thomson, a British explorer who has written about the early 20th-century Yale expeditions to Machu Picchu. "It's only when they rather conscientiously dusted it off and launched this rather impressive exhibition that the whole issue has surfaced again."

For much of the three years since the show first opened at Yale, Peru's claim on the objects has been played out in behind-the- scenes talks in Lima, Washington and New Haven between Yale and the government of President Alejandro Toledo. But in recent months the Peruvian government has taken its campaign public, threatening legal action if the university does not comply with its demands.

The Peruvian claim has gained additional momentum from a recent wave of disputes about national property issues and the collecting ethics of large American museums. Over the last few months, Italy has pursued an aggressive campaign to recover prized classical antiquities from several American museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Both Yale and the Peruvians say they hope for an amicable resolution, and talks continue. In December, Yale even offered to return numerous objects to Peru and help install and maintain them in a Peruvian museum. Up to now Peruvian officials have not responded to this proposal, saying that recognition of Peru's title to the entire collection must be the basis of any agreement.

"Yale is assuming that it owns the collection, and can negotiate with us which objects it wants to return and which it wants to keep," Luis Guillermo Lumbreras, director of Peru's National Institute of Culture in Lima, said in a telephone interview. "But that's not what we're talking about."

Unlike the cases involving the Getty and the Met which center on ancient treasures that Italian officials say were dug up by looters in recent decades the Machu Picchu objects have a far older and more complex history. They were removed during an authorized archaeological dig nearly a century ago; they were inspected by the Peruvian government before they left the country; and even Peruvian officials acknowledge that the objects themselves which consist largely of bones, ceramic pots and common Inca tools do not have great aesthetic or museum value.

On the other hand, Peru did have laws in force at the time governing archaeological finds, and its government in theory had ownership of any artifacts unearthed from Peruvian soil. As a result, the dispute has become something of a test case for the limits of cultural property claims against American institutions.

At the heart of the controversy is the complicated legacy of Bingham, who stumbled upon Machu Picchu in 1911. Before his arrival, the Inca complex, which occupies a spectacular remote site in the Peruvian Andes, had been unknown to all but a few local farmers around nearby Cuzco.

Bingham's discovery stirred enormous interest in the site. With the backing of the National Geographic Society, he returned to do excavations in the Machu Picchu area in 1912 and in 1914-15 the two expeditions that are at the center of the dispute.

Initially, he enjoyed considerable support from the Peruvian government. His early expeditions benefited from a letter of introduction from Lima and a Peruvian military escort; in 1912, he entered negotiations to give Yale an exclusive 10-year concession that would allow it to bring to the United States whatever it found.

But the negotiations fell through after a formal protest from Harvard that Yale was trying to shut its archaeologists out of Peru. Still, in October 1912, Bingham managed to secure a decree allowing him to take the contents of some 170 tombs he excavated at Machu Picchu. As a condition, the decree stated that Peru "reserves the right" to ask for the return of the objects, but did not state a specific time period for such a request to be made.

By the time of the second National Geographic expedition, however, Peru had become increasingly hostile to Bingham's activities, and the explorer was accused of spiriting Inca gold out of the country. After that, he did no further work at Machu Picchu, and the material he excavated elsewhere in Peru was subject to a far more stringent 1916 loan agreement of 18 months.

"It became very political," Lucy Salazar, one of the curators of the Yale exhibition, said of that era.

"A new indigenous movement was beginning to use the country's Andean roots to legitimize themselves."

Yale officials maintain that the university has complied with both the 1912 and 1916 agreements, and that after a series of loan extensions, all of the 1914-15 materials were returned to Peru in the 1920s. The university maintains that it is under no such obligation to return the earlier material from 1912.

"Bingham understood that he had the right to keep the objects from 1912 in New Haven for research, and that he had fulfilled his obligations," Yale said in a statement to The New York Times. Records made available by the National Geographic Society show that about half of the 1914-15 materials were returned to Peru in 1921. But there is no document recording the return of the remaining objects in that expedition, a society spokeswoman said.

Lumbreras, the Peruvian culture official, says that Yale returned only "a few bones" in the 1920s, but that there was never any question that the other objects should ultimately go back to Peru.

He said that Yale had no need for the objects. "After 90 years, Yale has had time to do all the research it wants," he said.

Yet Yale's recent research on the Bingham collection has been pivotal to cracking the mystery of Machu Picchu, a site whose purpose had eluded scholars for decades. Bingham argued variously that the site was a fabled early capital of the Incas or one of the empire's most important religious complexes where "virgins of the sun" were regularly sacrificed. Others have speculated about its possible astrological significance. But research led by Salazar and her husband, Richard Burger, a professor of anthropology at Yale and also a curator of the show, suggests that the site was simply one of many royal estates used as a country retreat away from Cuzco, the Inca capital.

Other researchers, citing the Yale team's extensive scientific work on the burials and the scholarly exhibition it assembled, suggest that Peru's campaign to get back the collection is politically motivated.

As the first indigenous Peruvian to hold the office, Alejandro Toledo has saluted the country's Inca heritage, even choosing to have part of his inauguration ceremony held at Machu Picchu in 2001.

"There has certainly been some beating of the Inca drum," said Thomson, the explorer.

But others argue that Peru has made great progress in protecting its once-neglected cultural heritage and the collection should go back.

"Machu Picchu has tremendous symbolic value to Peru," said Johan Reinhard, an Inca specialist who is explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society. By refusing to acknowledge Peruvian ownership, Yale "may be losing the cultural battle."

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