Wholesale Hiram Bingham and the Dream of Gold by Daniel Cohen

[Globe Pequot Publishing] Hiram Bingham was the ideal explorer-adventurer—handsome, rich, intelligent, brave, and tough. His life seems like something out of film hero Indiana Jones’s exploits in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The descendant of strong-willed missionaries, Bingham was born in Hawaii in 1875, At Yale he specialized in South American studies and became a college teacher. Gradually, the romance of the past took hold of his practical soul. Obsessed by the Incas and his dream of uncovering lost cities, Bingham initiated and expedition to Peru that would lead him to uncharted territories. Using quotations from Bingham’s accounts, Cohen describes how in 1911 Bingham made the greatest archaeological find of the century, the rediscovery of Machu Picchu, the abandoned Inca city in the remote Peruvian mountains. On later expeditions he discovered other lost cities, as he continued his research on the mysteries of Machu Picchu and the last of the Incans, despite the physical hardsh