Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu.

• Author: Golden, Carrie
• Position: Book review

CHRISTOPHER HEANEY, CRADLE OF GOLD: THE STORY OF HIRAM BINGHAM, A REAL LIFE INDIANA JONES, AND THE SEARCH FOR MACHU PICCHU (2010).

On July 24, 1911, an American followed a barefoot, eight year-old Peruvian boy to see Incan houses atop the terraced mountain on which the boy's family had farmed and lived for years. (1) The remains of those Incan houses now constitute one of the world's top tourist destinations, the famous Peruvian archaeological site, Machu Picchu. Christopher Heaney's Cradle of Gold." The Story of Hiram Bingham, A Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu offers a meticulously researched history of both the American explorer Hiram Bingham and the Incan artifacts Bingham brought from Machu Picchu back to the United States. Heaney's quest is to determine who owns the Incan artifacts currently resting at the Peabody Museum in New Haven. The quest is timely, given the claim pending in the District Court of Connecticut that the Republic of Peru filed against Yale University in 2008.

In Parts One and Two, Heaney's book--at once a biography, a history, and an adventure story--recounts the career influences of the explorer and his search for Machu Picchu. Bingham, the Yale-educated son of missionaries and husband to a Tiffany & Co. heiress, led various explorer missions. Interestingly, Heaney suggests that Bingham's initial adventuresome spirit came from the heavy influence of President Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 address to Congress, in which he declared that the United States had a duty to intervene in the affairs of its unstable neighbors. (2) Combined with President Taft's later dollar diplomacy, Heaney tells us that Bingham was inspired to build an empire of "business, knowledge and culture," (3) and that he pursued exploration of Latin America as a softer, "subtler sort of diplomacy." (4)

Inspired, Bingham proposed an expedition in 1911 to "collect the natural and human history of the Americas and bring it back" to the United States. (5) American institutions such as the Carnegie Institution, the Winchester Arms Company, the United Fruit Company, and the Eastman Kodak Company all provided funding for Bingham's Expedition. (6) Even President William Taft helped outfit Bingham's Expedition because he believed it could further U.S. foreign policy in the region. (7) Bingham, a lecturer in the history department, also managed to convince Yale to lend him the university name, but notably received no funding. (8) Fortunately for Bingham and the United States, Peru was in period of economic liberalization. (9) That meant the Peruvian government had fewer restrictions on foreign involvement in the country. Thus, the Yale Expedition, without which Machu Picchu may never have been reasserted onto the world's stage, was allowed to proceed.

In Parts Three and Four, Heaney sets out to help resolve the present dispute over who owns the Incan artifacts by carefully sifting through Peruvian law, international media reports, Bingham's and the Expedition's Papers, and Peruvian and American Archives in search of any indication of ownership. It seems that Bingham's understanding prior to the expedition was that any...