Hiram Bingham III

Lore & Background

Hiram Bingham III was an American academic, explorer, and politician. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Clara Brewster and Hiram Bingham II, an early Protestant missionary to the Kingdom of Hawai'i. His grandfather, Hiram Bingham I, and grandmother, Sybil Moseley Bingham, were also earlier missionaries. Through his mother, he was a descendant of William Brewster, a Mayflower passenger. Bingham attended O'ahu College (now Punahou School) before moving to the United States for higher education, graduating from Phillips Academy, Yale College, the University of California, Berkeley, and earning a Ph.D. from Harvard. He taught history and politics at Harvard and served as a preceptor under Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, before becoming a lecturer in South American history at Yale, where he became a pioneer in teaching and research on Latin American history. In 1911, he publicized the existence of the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, which he rediscovered with the guidance of local indigenous farmers. He was not a trained archaeologist. On his journey, guided by locals, he rediscovered and correctly identified the Inca sites of Vitcos and Vilcabamba, though he misidentified Machu Picchu as the "Lost City of the Incas." On July 24, 1911, Melchor Arteaga led him to Machu Picchu, which had been largely forgotten except by local inhabitants. Bingham found evidence that Peruvian explorer Agustín Lizárraga had reached the site in 1902, and initially acknowledged Lizárraga as the discoverer in his early writings, but later downplayed his role. Bingham later served as the 69th governor of Connecticut for a single day in 1925—the shortest term in history—and then as a U.S. Senator until 1933.

Reader's Guide

Hiram Bingham III's legacy is complex. He is widely credited with bringing Machu Picchu to global attention, transforming it into a major tourist destination. However, the article notes that he was not a trained archaeologist and that others had visited the site before him, including local explorers and a conquistador in the late 16th century. Bingham's initial acknowledgment of Agustín Lizárraga as discoverer was later minimized in his own accounts. He also served briefly as governor of Connecticut and as a U.S. Senator. His life reflects the intersection of exploration, academia, and politics, with ongoing debates about the ethics of artifact removal and historical credit.

Did You Know?

• Bingham was a descendant of William Brewster, a Mayflower passenger.
• The road to Machu Picchu is called Carretera Hiram Bingham.

The 1911 Arrival and International Recognition

In 1911, the American historian Hiram Bingham III made his way to a citadel perched on a mountain ridge in the Eastern Cordillera of southern Peru, and his subsequent publications thrust the place into the global spotlight. The site sits in the Machupicchu District of Urubamba Province, roughly eighty kilometers northwest of Cusco, rising above the Sacred Valley where the Urubamba River carves a deep canyon. At 2,430 meters, the ridge enjoys a subtropical mountain climate that has helped preserve its structures for centuries. Yet Bingham was far from the first outsider to reach the place. Local communities had known the hilltop settlement for generations, and before Bingham, the Peruvian explorer Agustín Lizárraga had already made his way to the ridge earlier in the twentieth century. What Bingham did differently was document and publicize the site for a broad international audience, transforming a locally recognized Inca complex into a subject of worldwide fascination. His 1911 accounts remain the pivotal moment through which the wider world first learned of the citadel's existence and architectural grandeur.

The Naming Controversy

One of the most debated aspects of Bingham's legacy concerns the very name attached to the site. A 2021 study published in Ñawpa Pacha, the Journal of the Institute of Andean Studies, proposed that the settlement was most likely called Huayna Picchu after the smaller peak nearby, or perhaps simply Picchu. The researchers argued that the pairing of the name Machu Picchu with the ruins is traceable to Bingham's own 1911 publications, a conclusion they backed with his field notes, early maps, and other historical documents. In Quechua, the word machu carries the meaning of old or old person, while wayna, rendered huayna in standard Spanish spelling, means young, and pikchu denotes a summit, peak, or pyramid. The settlement occupies a narrow saddle between two peaks bearing those very names, so the translation old mountain or old peak is a natural reading. Whether Bingham coined the phrase or merely popularized a local variant remains an open question, but his publications undeniably cemented the name in the global imagination.

What Bingham Documented: The Inca Citadel

The structures Bingham encountered in 1911 represented a remarkable feat of fifteenth-century Inca engineering. Built in the classical Inca style, the citadel is distinguished by its carefully worked dry-stone walls that have withstood centuries of subtropical weather. Among its most notable structures are the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of the Three Windows, and the Intihuatana ritual stone. Scholars believe the complex served as a seasonal royal estate for the Inca emperor Pachacuti, constructed after his conquest of the middle and lower Urubamba as part of a broader program of royal estates along the river. Radiocarbon dating places occupation between roughly 1420 and 1530, with construction spanning the reigns of Pachacutec and his successor Túpac Inca Yupanqui. An estimated seven hundred people inhabited the site, most of them yanacona support staff who lived there permanently, alongside religious specialists and temporary workers. No contemporary written records from the Inca period survive to confirm the site's exact purpose, leaving much of its story to archaeological inference.

From Obscure Ridge to Global Icon

Bingham's 1911 publications set in motion a transformation that would make the site one of the most recognizable landmarks in the Americas. What had been a locally known hilltop settlement became, over the following decades and centuries, a major archaeological site and one of the defining symbols of Inca civilization. Peru designated it a National Historic Sanctuary in 1981, and two years later UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site. In 2007, a global poll named it one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, a designation that further amplified its cultural reach far beyond the Andes. As of 2025, the citadel draws more than 1.5 million visitors each year, making it Peru's most visited international tourist destination. The trajectory from a quiet ridge in the Urubamba Valley to a headline-grabbing wonder of the modern world is, in many ways, a direct consequence of the attention Bingham's work first directed toward the site, even as scholars continue to refine and challenge the narratives his publications helped establish.