The Raven - Machu Picchu looted long before scholar's arrival

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Machu Picchu looted long before scholar's arrival

Updated Fri. Jun. 6 2008 7:48 AM ET

The Associated Press

LIMA, Peru -- The jungle shrouded Inca citadel of Machu Picchu may have been rediscovered - and looted - decades before the Yale scholar credited with the find first got there, a researcher said Thursday.

Most academics say Yale University's Hiram Bingham rediscovered the site in Peru's verdant southeastern Andes during a 1911 expedition.

But Paolo Greer, a retired Alaska oil pipeline foreman, says otherwise. Thirty years of digging through files in the United States and Peru led him to maps and documents showing that a German businessman named Augusto Berns got there first.

Berns purchased land across from Machu Picchu in 1867, and an 1887 document even shows he set up a company to plunder the site, Greer told The Associated Press.

Berns wrote that Machu Picchu "will undoubtedly contain objects of great value, and form part of those treasures of the Incas."

Peruvian historian Mariana Mould de Pease backs Greer's claim. She said she found in Yale University archives a letter of understanding between Berns and Peru's then-president to pillage the site, as long as the Peruvian government received 10 per cent of the profits.

David Ugarte Vega, the head of the Department of Anthropology and Archeology at the University of San Antonio Abad in Cuzco, who has studied Machu Picchu for more than 30 years, said that Greer's theory is plausible, but that more investigation is needed...

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