Inca Trail Of Hype

The Times (UK) ^ | 4-9-2002 | Nicholas Asheshov

[blam]

Inca trail of hype?

by Nicholas Asheshov
Has the National Geographic Society found a lost Inca city or a mining dump

An international row is breaking out over a dusty third-rate Inca site, newly located among the rugged snow-peaks and wild jungles of the Vilcabamba region beyond Machu Picchu. The spat pits the august National Geographic Society, Washington, against Peru’s influential Instituto Nacional de Cultura and a bevy of hardbitten American and British explorers.

The National Geographic claims that one of its expeditions has discovered a Lost Inca City, similar in significance to Macchu Picchu, the long-lost Inca citadel discovered in 1911 by an American, Hiram Bingham, also sponsored by the National Geographic Society.

But other noted explorers, as well as the Cultural Institute, a government department which rules over all the region’s ancient monuments, say that the Geographic’s claim is a “gross exaggeration”.

Even Peter Frost, 56, the British tour guide who says that he led the Geographic expedition to the Vilcabamba in June last year, admits that “with the benefit of hindsight, it would have been better to tone it down a bit”.

Yet it was the National Geographic Society, together with Frost at a press conference in Lima in mid-March, who trumpeted: “Lost Inca City Discovered in Peru!” It was, the Geographic’s relentless PR continued, “one of the most important sites” discovered since the Incas had marched off into the sunset “more than 400 years ago”.

The new “lost Inca city . . . the last refuge of the Incas” made headlines and TV and radio newscasts worldwide.

But the site, Cerro Victoria, 22 miles southwest, as the condor flies, from Machu Picchu, is, others claim, not a lost city. They say it is just the already looted remains of a dusty Inca mining camp, still used in more recent colonial and republican times, with some agricultural hamlets and llama pens, with a small Inca administration office and a couple of minor ceremonial platforms. It was “a temporary or hastily built settlement of low-status workers”, as described in a report by one of the leaders of the expedition, Gary Ziegler, an archaeologist.

The Geographic expedition, which now has at least four people, other than Ziegler, claiming to have been one of its co-leaders, walked into the Vilcabamba in June last year, accompanied by an NGS film crew, with safari-type camping gear and supplies carried on scores of mules and mountain ponies, with dozens of attendant staff — grooms, cooks and valets, most of them Quechua inhabitants of the region.

A helicopter, co-ordinated by satellite phones, brought in ground-penetrating radar (GPR). But even these elaborate efforts failed to produce anything beyond the daily bric-a-brac of Andean archaeology, including scores of crude, and already-looted, stone burial mounds.

According to Edwin Benavente, the director of the National Cultural Institute in Cuzco, which issues exploration and digging permits: “The National Geographic claims are very, very exaggerated”.

It’s not yet clear why the National Geographic Society, with over a century of productive exploration and publication under its belt, may have hyped up the Victoria site. But a possible clue is that it is advertising a film on Victoria, or Corihuayrachina as it now calls it, for showing on its cable channel next month.

There are thousands of sites scattered all over the Andes which, like Victoria, are technically valuable parts of the archaeological record but which are less than dramatic and by no stretch of even the PR imagination a “lost city”.

The most well-known and celebrated Inca sites, those that deserve and get the title of “city”, lost or otherwise, all have the world-renowned fine stonework patented by the Incas, with great complexes of carefully designed buildings and soaring flights of ritual terraces. They are also generally spread over large areas. Sites such as Machu Picchu, Pisac and Ollantaytambo are invariably spectacular, and many have commanding views of spectacular scenery.

[d4now]

Much ado about... well, next to nothing.

Bummer. I was excited the first time I read about it.