Lives in Ruins (29 page)

While the train's stewards fuss over us like flight attendants, serving miniature food with unnecessary flourish, and as “El Cóndor Pasa” and other trembling pan pipe music plays over the train's speakers, the scenery shifts from green plots and llama farms
framed by picturesque mountains to jagged desert-like canyons to jungle terrain with giant, vivid flora. The huge windows on the side and roof of the train are spotless, the better to see the rock formations and succulent plants as we descend via switchbacks from very high ground into the Sacred Valley of the Incas.

In
Andes
, my companion book for this journey, Michael Jacobs writes about geographer Alexander von Humboldt and botanist Aimé Bonpland's expedition to South America at the turn of the nineteenth century: their “sensory intoxication,” excited by “absolutely everything, almost incapable of taking in so many new phenomena: the climate, the natural abundance, the unusualness of the plants . . . the overwhelming sensuality of a world in which even the crabs were sky-blue and yellow.” It's an astute and amusing read for a journey like this, and Jacobs's accounts of traffic accidents involving plunging buses are fresh in my mind as the bus we transfer to in Aguas Calientes barrels up the mountain toward our destination.

We are within reach of what is arguably the most iconic archaeological find in a world that includes Pompeii, Petra, Angkor Wat, Stonehenge, and the great pyramids of Egypt, but anticipation is mixed with trepidation. Our driver meets another bus rocketing downhill and stomps the brakes; then slowly, painfully, and without any promise of success, our bus eases toward the unfenced edge, where a spectacular vista opens perilously close to our outer wheels. Then the buses creep past each other, close enough to suggest the Inca stonework that somehow features massive stone blocks wedged together so tightly that a credit card cannot fit between them. What would happen to world heritage if a bus full of archaeologists on the road to Machu Picchu tumbled over the edge and into the Urubamba River? For half an hour, such a fate is easy to imagine.

Perhaps it is fear that turns Elizabeth Bartley talkative. All the way up the mountain, she chats about the mounds of Ohio, the archaeology near her home in Cincinnati that remains largely unstudied. For years, the University of Cincinnati didn't even have a
specialist in Ohio archaeology. Why don't more people care about mounds? she wonders. I feel guilty hearing this.
Because they're dirt!
is the phrase I swallow all the way up the mountain. Then I remember Poverty Point and silently vow to make a pilgrimage to some really big, really obvious mounds soon. It's not just my bias, though: stone always trumps dirt in archaeological destinations. We are, after all, a busload of people, a parade of buses, ascending to a site carved out of stone.

Several archaeologists spoke at the conference about the problem of “invisible archaeology,” significant sites that are so humble in appearance, or buried, or otherwise hidden from the view of tourists, that they have trouble winning support. It's an interesting problem. Fritz the German—Friedrich Lüth, the president of the European Association of Archaeologists—mentioned the European continental shelf, which was above ground 20,000 years ago and now lies drowned along the current coastline and throughout most of the North and Baltic seas, a vast Paleolithic site. Scientists are working to try to map and preserve this tremendous resource, but because it will never be visible to tourists, it will probably never earn World Heritage protection. The millions of boots that trample through Machu Picchu and Petra take a toll, but they also support archaeology and help make the case for investing in preservation.

The travelers ascend the trail from the turnstile entrance, then gather on one of the terraces overlooking Machu Picchu: archaeologists from five continents standing on the sixth. We have reached a spectacular pinnacle of civilization. You don't have to know a thing to have your breath taken away. No amount of grooming—weeding, fitting stones back into place, keeping the golf-course-green grass tamed on terraces that once would have spilled over with potatoes and beans—can spoil the wildly improbable and spectacular jewel of a city, carved out of a mountain and brushed by clouds. But make no mistake, this site has been tidied. Look at old pictures of Machu Picchu when it was discovered by the American
explorer Hiram Bingham (in the quaint way that representatives of empire nations could “discover” a site that local families lived on) to see what an effort has been made to strip out its overgrowth and tame its unruly and jungly tendencies.

We look down on the lawns of the ceremonial plazas of Machu Picchu, nestled by a pretty maze of stone walls, with banked terraces and cliff faces forming a natural bowl; a game of badminton or croquet could be played on the plazas where a few alpaca roam. A European archaeologist turns to John Schofield, who used to work for the agency that oversees the historic buildings and monuments of England, and says wryly: “Looks like English Heritage is managing this.” They laugh, and those nearby laugh, too. Schofield points out one crucial difference—an English Heritage site would be crawling with tourists with self-guided tours clamped to their heads. And look at this gorgeous site, he says admiringly, and no personal audio devices!

Even with the help of trains and buses, we are breathless. How did the Incas live here, much less haul up the stones to create this? We get as close as we dare to the edge of the terrace, but there are few railings, and thousands of opportunities to misstep and tumble off the mountain. “Do you think the Incas raised children here?” someone says speculatively. “How did they keep them from falling off?”

The place is swarming with people, primarily people with gray hair and canes, and even one in a wheelchair, being lifted like a litter from terrace to terrace. Machu Picchu is a bucket-list destination, and, apparently, many people take the full span of their lives to work down their list. By the time we emerge on a ledge above the site and look down, we are 8,000 feet in the air and my heart is fluttering. Before descending to the plaza, we see two men carry a stretcher to a terrace above us and then hustle off with a stricken, strapped-on tourist.
Buena suerte, turista
. Like a band of monkeys who watch a tiger snatch one of their kind and carry him away, we blink and return to the alluring vista.

There are so many of us that we split into two groups, each with a guide. I fall in with the Brits, the Japanese, the African, and the American. As is the custom, our guide is native—in this case, a Peruvian descendant of the Incas. I am a descendant of those geniuses who built the Fishkill Supply Depot and used it to manage and win the War for Independence; I am also a descendant of the geniuses who boiled mammoth and buffalo bones for bone grease. But our guide, Miguel, is the descendant of the geniuses who built Machu Picchu, and he stands here, magisterial, his eyes locked on ours as he details in a musical voice the wondrous accomplishments of the Inca from half a millennium ago. His ancestors did not just haul tons of stone a ridiculous vertical distance (without wheels, no less), carve them with great skill and artistry, and engineer the remote site with an ingenuity we can still learn from—they also apparently laid out the whole thing so at certain times of year, the light of the sun or moon would beam on particular sacred spots. For a stargazer who squints at the night sky through the ambient light pollution of New York City, this is almost impossible to imagine, but our guide tells us something new about astronomy at every stop—this tiny window in this stone wall lights up only on the winter solstice; that structure was an observatory—until the displays of mathematical and celestial expertise of those old Peruvians begins to feel like the work of superhumans. And they were artists, as well. On one of the center terraces I see an elegant, jagged rock sculpture placed squarely in front of an elegant, jagged mountain, a harmonic echo of the sort that can be seen all over the site. Day and night, summer and winter, the human construction chimes with nature.

The archaeologists move single file along one terraced level and circle down to the main court level, descending into the bowl of Machu Picchu, all professional eyes appraising the architecture. Miguel gestures toward the stone buildings we pass, various residences and storerooms, but as he leads us past the entrances, Sinamai and John Schofield and Yo Negishi and Elizabeth Bartley peel
off and duck beneath the lintels to explore, marveling at the window frames and door frames and niches, and snapping photos. Our guide scrupulously avoids enclosures, but archaeologists are happy to wiggle into tiny spaces. I follow one into a room the size of a closet. “Do you think Miguel is claustrophobic?” he says.

You can tell the archaeologists, of course, by their photos. The tourists' photos feature people in front of mountains, terraces, stone structures, sundials. The archaeologists wait until the people move away to take theirs: they want the terrace, the stone wall, the lintel, the human-made thing, all sans humans.

I think the archaeologists are like the alpacas that roam the site, scrambling in the heat for hours without food or water. No snacks or drinks inside the gates of Machu Picchu, and the
baños
are back at the entrance and require a single
sol
. These arkies are tough. And ultimately they agree: this is one sweet archaeology site, even if there are too many tourists streaming through. One archaeologist leans over to look at the lower slope, overgrown with vines and trees—the groomed and mapped and guided part of Machu Picchu is only the beginning. Up and down the sides of this mountain, more sites are waiting to be excavated. The guide tells us that teams are working now to uncover other parts of the hidden city. Machu Picchu will grow. There are limits now on the number of people allowed to enter the site and hike the Inca Trail. The United Nations, in the form of its committees and advisory groups like ICAHM, will lean on Peru to limit even further the number of people tromping over the site. But as we learned at the conference, Peru, counting the tourists pouring in, is contemplating new entrance gates and information centers, expanded rail service, perhaps a nearby airport in its future.

Meanwhile, the dashing Veysel Apaydin, a generation or two younger than most of the other archaeologists on this jaunt, has gone off to climb the insane peak of Huayna Picchu, risking life and limb to clamber up to the Incan priests' summit. Hours later, he
catches up with us, sweating testosterone, biceps bulging—and then he's gone again. While we ride the bus down the mountain, hugging the inside track this time, Veysel makes the ninety-minute descent down the ancient staircase/donkey trail that Hiram Bingham used a century ago. “We're all old people to him,” one of my companions notes.

On the tour, our guide, Miguel, mentioned with pride the great Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady Solís, who discovered the oldest city in the Americas, Caral, located near the Peruvian coast a few hours north of Lima. How wonderful to hear Shady's countryman brag about her on this peak, and I think about her as I descend the mountain. Ruth Shady—not Machu Picchu—was what drew me to Peru. Don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled to see Machu Picchu, but Shady was the reason I came here.

I LIKE ARCHAEOLOGISTS
who throw their whole beings into the work and fight for scraps of rock and bone and their own vision and interpretation of the past. I like originals, and Shady is clearly one of those. As a young archaeologist, she combed aerial photographs of Peru and found some odd-looking features rising out of the Supe Valley. Guided by the photographs, she ventured out into the Peruvian desert a few hours north of Lima. According to a riveting article in
Archaeology
, “Shady endured an almost unimaginable regime of poverty and lawlessness as she tried to start work,” including being shot at by masked robbers. She dug during the day and went to school at night. She began teaching at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima and used students and soldiers from a nearby base to help her excavate the big hills, exposing the pyramids underneath. She was a force: somehow, over the course of fifteen years, she managed to get most of the road from the coast to Caral paved; somehow, she protected Caral from flagrant looting; and, eventually, her efforts led to
Caral's recognition and designation as a World Heritage site. And in another good move, she renamed the site Caral from the original Chupacigarro Grande (East).

Shady's only misstep seemed to be inviting a husband- and-wife team of American archaeologists, Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer, to help her complete the expensive work of carbon-dating that would allow her to calculate the age of Caral. An article in
Discover
titled “Showdown at the O.K. Caral” recounted Haas's pitch to Shady about the advantages of a partnership: “as a stateside coauthor, he could secure grants for her project—hard to come by in impoverished Peru—from U.S. sources.” The Americans took the samples from Caral and sent them to the lab, which established the surprisingly ancient date of 2,627
B
.
C
.; then they published the results in
Science
under all three bylines. This was sensational news. It meant Caral was as old as the Egyptian pyramids! Haas and Creamer were hailed as discoverers and quoted widely, particularly in the English-language press. Though the couple later tried to correct the misconception that they were anything but latecomers to this research, Shady was furious; she refused to work or speak with them again.

Haas and Creamer weren't going away, however; they had seen mounds all over the river valleys near Caral and were eager to dig in. In spite of the damage to their reputation and prominent archaeologists denouncing their appropriation, they won additional funding, hired Shady's graduate assistant and other students from her university, pulled together a big team of American students, and began their own dig just north of Caral.