[MSN] Stealing From the Incas.

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October 7, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Stealing From the Incas 
By CHRISTOPHER HEANEY
Berkeley, Calif.

RECENTLY, Yale and the Peruvian government announced that the university
would finally acknowledge Peru’s ownership of about 5,000 skulls, bones and
artifacts excavated from the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu and exported to New
Haven by the explorer Hiram Bingham nearly a century ago.

Yale said it would return about 380 “museum-quality” pieces when Peru
finished a museum to house them, as well as part of the “research
collection.” In addition, Yale would finance at least three years of
academic exchange and help curate a traveling exposition on the expeditions
that made Machu Picchu famous. From the perspective of science, the
compromise seems a good one, and should be praised.

But there’s a reason Yale and Peru buried their announcement by releasing it
late on a Friday night: on closer examination, the terms are less favorable
to Peru than presumed; and from the perspective of history, the compromise
leaves a lot to be desired. It recalls in effect if not intent the task that
Hiram Bingham gave a Peruvian worker in 1912: scrubbing from Machu Picchu’s
walls the names of Peruvians who visited the ruins before him. 

When President Alejandro Toledo of Peru demanded the return of the Machu
Picchu collection a few years ago, it was a claim well informed by history.
“Of course we are not going with any idea of hunting buried treasure,” Hiram
Bingham had told The New York Sun in March 1911. “Should anything be found
in that line it would become the property of the Peruvian government.” But
Bingham’s tune changed after he saw Machu Picchu that summer. The following
year he returned and — in his words — paid “forced labor from the Peruvian
government” to excavate antiquities for Yale’s museum.

Peru surprised Bingham by calling the hundred-plus tombs of Machu Picchu a
“treasure” in their own right: the human traces of the Incas and their great
empire. The government let the artifacts leave for Yale, on the condition
that the university would return the collection when asked. But when Peru
called for the artifacts’ return several years later, Yale sent back “47
cases of human skeletal remains” (as described in the accompanying letter)
from sites other than Machu Picchu.

It seemed cut-and-dry — Yale broke Bingham’s agreement — and President
Toledo’s government refused anything less than the collection’s complete
return. The university wouldn’t admit any wrongdoing, however, outlasted
Peru’s threatened lawsuit and in July 2006 welcomed the election of
President Alan García. The new administration’s less aggressive approach got
Yale to recognize Peruvian ownership of the collection, and will bring an
infusion of Ivy League money to the country’s archaeological programs. But
one member of Mr. Toledo’s negotiating team criticized the condition that
Yale would retain part of the “research collection.” 

“How much longer will those pieces stay there? A century more?” Luis
Lumbreras, the director of the National Institute of Culture under President
Toledo, asked in the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio. 

Mr. Lumbreras was right. The current director of the National Institute of
Culture claims that all of the Machu Picchu artifacts will be returned
eventually, but omitted a wrinkle that Yale’s vice president and general
council shared with The Yale Daily News: that “Peru will grant Yale the
right to possess and use the research materials that will stay at Yale” —
“usufructurary rights” — for a term of 99 years. Peru will be able to access
the pieces, but the condition makes Peru’s “title” to the artifacts more and
more symbolic.

This is just one skeleton left in Yale’s closet. To move forward with
negotiations, Peru left the question of Yale’s other collections off the
table. The country gave up the chance to find out what happened to a group
of artifacts, including the only gold ever found by the expedition, smuggled
out in a trunk in 1914. The artifacts made it to New Haven only after being
saved from a shipwreck and were listed on Yale’s online register until they
were pointed out in October 2006; Yale took them down, claiming the
inventory was flawed.

Lastly, there are the artifacts for which Bingham paid $480,000 in today’s
money to Peruvian antiquarians, who then smuggled the pieces to Yale. Peru
and the United States’ 1997 agreement to stop antiquity smuggling in essence
ignores artifacts trafficked before 1981 — understandable from a logistical
standpoint — but their existence compromises Yale’s moral high ground.

Yale recognized Peru’s “ownership” of the Machu Picchu artifacts only
because Peru overlooked the past and traded away having complete control
over the collection. Yale’s claim that this was a breakthrough for cultural
property disputes is unfortunately true: of the countries that have recently
begun campaigns to have illegally and unethically held art and artifacts
returned — Italy, Greece and Egypt — not one has let the culpable
institution so define the terms of their settlement. 

It’s the sort of sleight of hand that closes a movie filmed in Machu Picchu
in 1953, “Secret of the Incas,” starring Charlton Heston as Harry Steele, an
unshaven and unscrupulous explorer in a fedora and bomber jacket who sneaks
into Machu Picchu and steals the “golden sunburst” of the last Inca emperor.
The American develops a conscience and returns it, explaining, “I guess
finding it meant more to me than keeping it.” But as Steele turns to go, and
as the Peruvians celebrate in the ruins below, he hands his blond bombshell
a golden Inca shawl pin. “Must have fallen into my pocket while I was in the
tomb,” he drawls.

The pockets of Yale’s erstwhile Indiana Jones, sadly, have proved far deeper
than Steele’s.

Christopher Heaney is a Yale graduate who lived in Peru from 2005 to 2006 on
a Fulbright fellowship. He is writing a history of Hiram Bingham and Machu
Picchu.

http://www.nytimes.com/