Bingham, searching for the last Inca stronghold of Vilcabamba, was led by local farmer Melchor Arteaga to the ruins perched on a ridge above the Urubamba River in Peru. Though local families had long known of the site, Bingham's photographs and Yale-sponsored excavations introduced Machu Picchu to the world, transforming it into Peru's most iconic archaeological treasure and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Bingham was not actually looking for Machu Picchu—he was hunting for Vilcabamba, the Inca's final refuge from Spanish conquest, and initially misidentified Machu Picchu as that lost city. The confusion persisted in his popular writings for years, even after other scholars correctly identified Espíritu Pampa, a different ruin, as the true Vilcabamba.
When Bingham arrived, the eleven-year-old son of a local farmer, along with the farmer Arteaga, guided him up a steep, overgrown slope in the rain to the ruins, which were being used partly as farmland by a couple of Quechua families who had never lost track of the site's existence. Bingham's real contribution was scientific documentation and publicity—stunning photographs published in National Geographic in 1913 turned the terraced citadel into a global sensation.
The site's granite structures, fitted together without mortar with astonishing precision, and its dramatic setting among cloud-wrapped Andean peaks, made it an instant icon of pre-Columbian engineering. Bingham's expeditions also removed thousands of artifacts to Yale, which became the subject of a decades-long repatriation dispute with Peru, finally resolved with returns beginning around 2011.