Message #233506

[Paradox]

After: Modern Machu Picchu

Photograph by Harvey Lloyd, Getty Images

Today the buildings at Machu Picchu are free of the vines and jungle growth that covered them when Bingham first arrived in 1911. The homes of the indigenous Indian families that Bingham encountered during his first visit are also gone.

Those families didn't live in Machu Picchu's stone buildings but rather in wooden huts that they had built on other parts of the mountain ridge.

"Bingham's arrival really changed their lives, because the landowner now knew there were people living there," Heaney said. The landowner "might have started collecting rent, we don't know. But we do know that there were three families living there in 1911, and by 1915 only one family was left."

That family was eventually hired by the Peruvian government to be caretakers of the site.

(Take a Machu Picchu quiz.)

Published July 22, 2011