Machu Picchu | National Geographic

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Certainly, what he saw was awe-invoking. Contemporary Peruvian expert Luis Lumbreras, the former director of Peru's National Institute of Culture, describes "a citadel made up of palaces and temples, dwellings and storehouses," a site fulfilling ceremonial religious functions.

Machu Picchu is formed of buildings, plazas, and platforms connected by narrow lanes or paths. One sector is cordoned off to itself by walls, ditches, and, perhaps, a moat—built, writes Lumbreras, "not as part of a military fortification [but] rather as a form of restricted ceremonial isolation."

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The Wrong "Lost City"

Bingham's discovery was published in the April 1913 issue of National Geographic magazine, bringing the mountaintop citadel to the world's attention. (The National Geographic Society helped fund Bingham on excursions to Machu Picchu in 1912 and 1915.)

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Bingham believed he had found Vilcabamba, the so-called Lost City of the Inca where the last of the independent Inca rulers waged a years-long battle against Spanish conquistadors. Bingham argued for and justified his conclusions for almost 50 years after his discovery, and his explanations were widely accepted.

What Bingham had found, however, was not the lost city, but a different lost city.

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