After spending nearly a century at Yale University, a collection of artifacts from Machu Picchu will soon be returned to Peru, the university announced Sept. 14 in a joint statement with the Peruvian government.
Approximately 380 whole, museum-quality objects in the collection, along with a portion of a separate collection used for research at Yale, will be returned to Peru, according to a Sept. 17 article in the Yale Daily News.
An as-yet-undetermined number of objects from the research collection and some of the museum-quality objects will remain at Yale for ongoing research, according to the article.
Yale will "acknowledge Peru's title to all the excavated objects," the joint statement read.
The artifacts were originally extracted from Machu Picchu between 1911 and 1915 in the famous expedition by Yale professor Hiram Bingham III, who rediscovered the 15th-century Incan citadel. The city was thought to have been lost since the time of the Incan empire's fall to Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century.
"Yale is at last recognizing title to every piece that was excavated from Machu Picchu by Hiram Bingham," said Peru's housing minister, Hernan Garrido-Lecca, in a statement.
In exchange for returning the artifacts, the university will receive rights to extract artifacts from Peru's collection of nearly 10,000 for research either at Yale or in Peru, depending on which site provides the best facilities. In addition, Yale will retain "usufructuary rights," which will allow the university to hold on to several of the research materials, now housed at the Peabody Museum in New Haven, on a renewed lease that will run for 99 years, according to the Daily News.
The two parties will sign a formal agreement on the terms of the exchange within 60 days, the Daily News reported.
The road to the negotiations has not been smooth. In December 2005, then-president of Peru Alejandro Toledo threatened to sue Yale for the return of the artifacts. The idea was dropped by the current Peruvian president, Alan Garcia, who this summer appointed Garrido-Lecca as liaison to the university. Over the summer, university officials traveled to Peru to begin the negotiations that concluded at Yale on Sept. 14, according to the Daily News.
"In many ways, the agreement is very close to what we've been talking about for the last two years," Yale President Richard Levin told the Daily News. "We had always acknowledged that as part of a settlement we would give them the title as long as we solved certain problems."
Richard Burger, a Yale professor of anthropology who was involved in the discussions with Peru, said he was satisfied with the agreement. "I think in some ways this is a model settlement," he said. "It focuses on a forward-looking perspective within the framework of education and research. ... It moves away from obsessive repatriation and seeks to find common ground."
Michael Donoghue, director of Yale's Peabody Museum, was also enthusiastic about the settlement.
"I do think we reached an excellent, novel solution, which has some elements that can transfer to other such situations (where nations request the return of artifacts)," Donoghue said in an e-mail to The Herald. Donoghue was part of the team that traveled to Peru during the summer.
The approximately 380 artifacts will be included in a traveling exhibit curated by Burger that has been seen by people in seven cities, he said. It will soon tour cities in Europe and possibly Asia. Subsequently the artifacts will return to Peru, where they will be housed in a $5-million museum being constructed for the purpose in the city of Cuzco set to open in 2010.
The traveling exhibit, Burger said, "is good for Peru because it stimulates interest in Peru's past."
