It was announced today that agreement had been reached about the fate of the 40 000 artefacts (which include bronze knives, silver jewellery and fragmented pottery), removed by Hiram Bingham and the National Geographic Society from the mountain-top Inca refuge of Machu Piccu a century ago (John Quigley 'Yale to Return Incan Artifacts Taken a Century Ago, Peru's President Says', Bloomberg News 20th Nov 2010). Peru had been trying to retrieve the artefacts from the 1912, 1914-15 expeditions since 2003, and the case threatened to come to court. The news that the Peruvian government had finally come to an amicable agreement with Yale was published today on the website of the website of the Peruvian president Alan Garcia:
“The Peruvian government welcomes this decision and recognizes that Yale University preserved the pieces that otherwise would have been scattered around the world in private collections or might have disappeared,”Garcia said, making a clear reference to the looting of archaeological sites which has plagued Peru for many years. They will be kept at San Antonio Abad University in Cuzco, where Yale researchers will be able to keep studying them.
There is a twelve-part summary of the ongoing dispute on Kim MacQuarrie’s Peru & South America Blog - listed here and here.
UPDATE: Cultural Property Observer apparently does not approve: "Yale Capitulates on Machu Picchu Archaeological Materials".
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