MACHU PICCHU HAD ANOTHER NAME FIRST, RESEARCHERS SAY
For decades, the breathtaking ruins that have brought hundreds of thousands of tourists to Peru every year have gone by the name “Machu Picchu,” or “Old Mountain” in Quechua, the language of the Incas spoken by millions today.
The name is all over signs welcoming visitors to the settlement in the Andes, above the Urubamba River valley and a train journey from Cusco, the ancient Incan capital. The website of Peru’s Ministry of Culture has a page dedicated to its history that also links to tickets.
But the name of the town, built by the Incas in the 15th century, is technically “Huayna Picchu,” or “New Mountain,” according to researchers who pored through documents dating to the 1500s to verify the original moniker.
“The results uniformly suggest that the Inca city was originally called Picchu, or more likely Huayna Picchu,” Donato Amado Gonzales, a historian at Peru’s Ministry of Culture, and Brian S. Bauer, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois-chicago, wrote in an article that was published online in August in Ñawpa Pacha: Journal of Andean Archaeology.
Their findings were announced last month by the university.
The ruins became widely known as Machu Picchu after 1911, when Hiram Bingham, a lecturer at Yale University, began visiting the region and publishing accounts of his travels.
Bingham apparently heard the name “Machu Picchu” from Melchor Arteaga, a tenant farmer who acted as Bingham’s guide during his travels to the ruins, according to the article.
He had also heard it called “Huayna Picchu,” the article’s coauthor, Amado Gonzales, said.
He said it would be “an exaggeration” to say that it was a mistake to call the town “Machu Picchu” all these years. “The city, the Inca town, is in the jurisdiction of Huayna Picchu,” he said.
But “Machu Picchu” is not a term that Bingham invented — it is the Quechuan name of the larger mountain peak that flanks the ancient site to the north. “Huayna Picchu” is the name of the smaller peak to the south.
In other words, tour operators do not have to start correcting themselves. “You do not need to change the name,” Amado Gonzales said.