Hiram Bingham was born on November 19, 1875 and died on June 6,
1956. He was an academic, explorer,
treasure hunter and politician from the United States. He made public the
existence of the Quechua citadel of Machu Picchu in 1911. Bingham
was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. He went to the
United States in his teens in order to complete his education, and entered a very prestigeous in Andover, Massachusetts. from
which he graduated in 1894. He taught history and politics at Harvard and in 1908, he had
served as delegate to the First Pan American Scientific Congress at Santiago de Chile On his way home
viaPeru, a local prefect convinced him to
visit the pre-Columbian city and Bingham published
an account of this trip in Across South America; an account of a journey
from Buenos Aires to Lima by way of Potosí, with notes on Brazil, Argentina,
Bolivia, Chile, and Peru (1911).
Bingham returned to Peru
in 1912 and 1915 with the support of Yale .
Machu Picchu has become
one of the major tourist attractions in South America, and Bingham is
recognized as the man who brought the site to world attention, although many
others helped to bring this site into the public eye. On June 6, 1956, Bingham died at his
Washington, D.C. home.