Camp Gagnon - Who ACTUALLY Built Machu Picchu

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

Today, we journey through history, myth, and engineering genius to uncover the complex truth behind one of the most breathtaking wonders on Earth: Machu Picchu. From the dramatic cloud forests of the Andes and incredible dry-stone construction to royal estate life, a sudden and mysterious abandonment, Hiram Bingham’s famous rediscovery, and the ancient site’s real, forgotten name, we explore how an elusive 15th-century mountain sanctuary was built, why it was left behind, and what it reveals about the Inca Empire. Welcome to History Camp! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsor: Morgan & Morgan Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon 👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com 🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com Timestamps: 00:00 - Christos YAPPIN 03:40 - What is Machu Picchu? 05:16 - Why Build Here? 08:50 - Construction of Machu Picchu 16:36 - Civilians of Machu Picchu 22:27 - Escape From Machu Picchu 26:31 - Hiram Bingham’s Discovery 29:50 - Machu Picchu's REAL Name 35:41 - Drop Your Thoughts! #foryou #history #mystery Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

High in the sky, built into the ridges of two Andean peaks, sits one of the most colossal palaces known to man. For hundreds of years, it survived earthquakes, landslides, and relentless South American rain. But how it survived isn't even the most mysterious thing about it, because we're not even really sure what its real name is. This is the story of Machupeachia. For hundreds of years, it was called a lost city. It was said to be the last refuge of the Inca's. They thought that it was a sacred sanctuary for holy women. And some say that it is even so impressive and its technology is so advanced that it wasn't even built by humans at all. Yeah, today we'll be unpacking the mysteries of this wonder of the world.

How did it stay intact after all this time? How was something this intricate, this remote built and maintained? And who was the lost civilization that kept it going? That's what we're climbing up, 8,000 feet to find out. So sit back, relax. and welcome to History Camp. What's up, dude, and welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent

where every single Wednesday we explore the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from all history from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here in this tent, is I try to figure out everything that's ever happened. And there's a lot of stuff going on. Every day, there's new history getting made, and every minute that I'm sitting here wasting time is another minute we could be deep diving on the craziest stuff that's ever happened.

But before I jump into Machu Picchu, and why it's so amazing and really what it is and who built it and how, I want to thank you. Yeah, dude, I want to thank you right now. Driving your car, turning left, going to work, leaving work. Whatever you're doing right now, I want to say thanks for tuning in. Or girl, whoever you are, I don't really care, but I just want to say thanks for tuning in and listening to the show because every time you click, comment, like, anything like that,

you interact with our content, you tell the algorithm overlord gods, we're doing a good job. And you keep the lights on in the tent, you keep the fire burning here. at the campsite. Now, I also want to thank the man to my right. He's the Greek freak himself. He helps me pronounce all the words whenever we're doing Greek history. His name is Christos Cambecalicos.

How are you? Doing great, Mark. How are you? How do you pronounce your last name? I don't care, Chrisos. Come on, dude, you've got to see that one coming. Did you see that one coming? Not at all.

How do you pronounce it? You're not getting me twice in a row. Fair, well played. Anyway, let's talk about Machu Picage. If you knew to the show, I'm sorry. It's just a little inside joke. I feel like people are going to start interpreting me that. There's going to be a complaation.

on YouTube of like every time I shut you down, it's gonna be like Mark's the worst. Look how we talk to Christos. And maybe they're right. I'm gonna turn over a new leaf. After this episode, all right? So, let's talk about Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu is fastening.

You've probably seen it before. You've seen pictures of it. You've seen it in like postcards and stuff. Even if you've never been to Peru, even if you've never left your country, you've probably seen what this thing is. It is a 15th century Incasite tucked high in the Andes,

mountains of southern Peru. And in 2007, it was voted like the new seven wonders of the world, which I guess they're making a new list. And I don't know why it's seven. We could probably increase that. It's a lot of wondrous places, is all I'm saying. Now, at first glance, you're looking at it, it kind of doesn't look like a lot from the pictures, but it's like kind of like a maze of like these gray stone walls and like staircases laid out across like the spine with like these green terraces on this mountain ridge. I think it's beautiful looking, especially if you get the right picture and talking to people that have been there I've never been they say it is truly remarkable now let's just start by clearing out the biggest misunderstanding and everything else kind of depends on it

uh despite what a lot of people assume machi pichu was not a city at least not in the way that you're picturing it anyway it wasn't like a bustling town of like markets and crowds and like people like selling wares it was probably a royal estate now what is that exactly it's basically a country Palace for an emperor wrapped in like these massive gardens and terraces with like an elite residence with, you know, all the people helping the court and shrines and like a hidden water system, which is fascinating. We'll talk about that. And like even living quarters for the staff who kept the whole thing up and running.

Think of it almost as like a private royal compound built into the mountainside, part palace, part farm to table restaurant, part sanctuary. So Machu Picchu sits on a ridge about 8,000. feet up looking down at a river known as the Urumbamba River roughly 45 miles from the Inca capital Kusco. But this is not the bleak frozen like highland that you would expect from this specific mountain range. It's actually pretty warm and shockingly green. And there's actually a humid cloud forest where the mountains start their long descent towards the Amazon. So for the Inca elite, that was like a huge part of the appeal. They're basically looking at this like little

piece of mountain that is extremely fertile farmland. It's actually a more mild climate than the capital, and they have access to an entirely new ecosystem all within reach of where they're actually commanding the whole empire. So why build a palace here specifically? Well, the name that history attached to this place is actually Pachacuti. And in Inca tradition, Pachacuti was a ruler who took a small kingdom around Kusko and turned it into Tawintin Suu, which turned out to be the largest empire that the Americas has ever seen, stretching thousands of miles down the spine of South America. So this guy was a conqueror and a builder on a massive scale. And the estates that he and his lineage left behind are not just like vacation homes.

They are a proof of his immense wealth and power. But there's a catch. When an Inca ruler died, his estate didn't pass to the next king. It actually stayed with his bloodline, with his lineage, what they would say, his panaca, to fund ceremonies and like basically maintain his wealth and like host feasts and all that stuff. And it's all done in the dead king's name. So they stored up wealth, although, you know, that was also used to like care for like his mummified body, which in this tradition was treated as if it were in some sense still present.

So a place like this was designed to keep a dead king's memory and his power and his majesty, basically alive for his descendants to appreciate and, and pay respects to for generations to come. But, and this is very important, but we do not have a single Inca document or, like, tangible proof that says, like, hey, Pachucchi built Machu, and he ordered it, and he wrote it down. Like, the Inca didn't really have a writing system. So they left behind no official written record at all.

What we do have, though, is a general archaeological consensus that this was a royal estate of Pachikuti's lineage. and that is strong and well-supported reading of the historical evidence. Again, I'm not a historian, but this is what historians have generally said. Again, it's not confirmed beyond a doubt. And honestly, that opens up a whole other world around Machupechu and a whole other mystery. But that's not even all of it. We're not even sure when it was built.

So for a long time, mainstream historians thought they had the timeline settled. So the traditional kind of consensus was that Pachikuti rose to power around like, 1438 AD. And then everyone just assumed that like this estate on this mountain ridge came like sometime shortly after. But then as recently as 2021, a study came out that used precise radiocarbon dating on the bones and the teeth of 26 people who are buried at the site. And they found that people were living and dying there from roughly like 1420 onward. Now, keep that in mind because the distinction is pretty crazy. Those dates tell us when people were living at Machu Picchu, not the year. that the first wall went up.

It tells us about the occupation, not the construction of the actual structure. So if people were already living on this ridge around 1420, and Pachikuti didn't come to power until 1438, then either the dates are a little bit off, maybe the emperor's off, or the actual occupation of this place began earlier than anyone thought,

or maybe both. Now, suddenly the timeline that everyone thought was historical fact has a weird kind of discrepancy in it. at this point we still can't say for sure when construction actually started. So we have a palace that we think was made for a king that then died, built in a place chosen specifically for the climate in an extremely remote area on a foundation of dates that don't really match up perfectly. There are so many questions and mysteries to pull apart here. So let's just start with the location. This is a steep, rain-soaked, earthquake-ridden ridge. So how do you even build a palace here?

and how does it stay up for 500 years? Well, first you have to address a very popular idea right now. The idea that Machu Picchu is somehow impossible. Now, of course, this is camp. We're going to talk about this. People typically will look at these kinds of structures and be like, must have been built by aliens. Now, that is a deep dive for another time,

but it's worth acknowledging because people have said this. To be honest with you, there is a lot of archaeological evidence that shows us that everything there was built by human beings and using methods that we actually, do understand better than a lot of other sort of amazing sort of megalithic structures. So the real question that we're looking at isn't how could someone build this? The bigger question is how did a single state organize enough knowledge, labor, and planning to pull it off in a place that is this remote and this brutal? And it is brutal. Again, if you're living there, it's like,

it's a gorgeous oasis. But if you're building there, it's tough. And it's tough because the ridge gets drenched. We're talking like six to seven feet of rain every year. And the slopes, I mean, you see the pictures, they're incredibly steep. So the whole region on top of that is getting earthquakes all the time. So basically, water and gravity are working around the clock, trying to

drag the entire mountainside straight down into the valley. And look, anyone can stack up stones. Like every culture has done this. But how do you keep them from sliding off for five centuries? That's tough. So the walls of Machu Picchu are literally just incredible.

They're massive granite blocks, and they're fitted together so perfectly you can't even get a knife blade between them. And the crazy thing, there's no mortar. So, like, with bricks and stuff, you would put bricks down, and then you have like a cement kind of mortar between the bricks, and you kind of can see the mortar. But with these, it's so close and so flush and so perfectly placed, there's no gaps, and it's stunning. And they're actually not the center of the masterpiece. So there's this guy, a civil engineer named Kenneth Wright, who's supposed to be a civil engineer named Kenneth Wright, who's spent decades studying Machu Picchu. And he estimated that around 60% of the entire construction effort at Machu Picchu is underground.

Literally, like, where no tourist even sees, which means all the gorgeous, like, famous stonework, that's basically just like the last, like, thinnest layer sitting on top of an entire buried mountain of mind-blowing engineering. I mean, it's like an iceberg, right? Like most of the iceberg is way under the water. So take the terraces, for example, these like pretty green steps. like in every photo that you see, they were never just farmland. If you sliced one open, you find these carefully built layers that are massive stones down

at the bottom and then gravel and then sand and then a cap of soil right on top. That is like the whole sandwich and it's genius because it's designed to let rainwater drain straight down through it. So it doesn't pool up and get heavy and like push the walls out. So there are 700 of these terrace walls wrapped around the whole site and together they're not just growing food, they're literally like holding the mountain, like the structure of the mountain in place. And running through the whole complex is a drainage network, something like 130 little outlets built right into the walls and into the staircases, all feeding water into a central channel that

carries it safely off the ridge. And that's just the water that they needed to get rid of because they had a completely different source for the water that they actually wanted to consume. So they found a natural spring up on the slope above the site and they channeled it downhill through a hand-cut stone canal all the way through a chain of 16 fountains running straight through the heart of this estate. There's even a study suggesting that those fountains were shaped in a way that could have made like filling up big water jars, these vessels that they called Arrabolos, pretty easy and like seamless. Now, to be fair, the last part is kind of an engineer's guess. Like we don't have a hard fact of exactly how they were utilized and for what. But the point

stands. This was a working water system designed around functional daily life. And like the tools, I mean, the tools to do this are crazy. You see, the tools that they had for the time or maybe that they didn't have is maybe the biggest reason why people tend to point to like lost knowledge or aliens. Like you often hear that the Inca built all of this without the wheel, without metal tools. And those claims need a little bit of context because the Inca actually did know about wheels, right? This is around the 1400s that people are dating this. They just had no big animals to, like, pull carts. And honestly, wheels are kind of useless on mountains anyway.

And so they definitely had metal. They just didn't have iron or steel or, like, any kind of machinery. So they likely shaped this granite using stonehammers and bronze tools, and they were actually making and repairing the bronze right there on site. So this was a really sophisticated toolkit that made sense for their people and their resources and, like, the geography that they were working on. Just, you know, like the way the structure is designed is just genius. And now, even those slightly inward-leaning walls that you can see, the trapezoid-shaped doorways,

they had a purpose. And their purpose was that they helped the whole place survive earthquakes. Yeah. Do you have a friend that buys gold instead of crypto because he doesn't trust the internet? That's a power move. You got a buddy that has like a backup generator and a bunch of canned food and somehow knows that a blackout's coming before the power company does. That's a power move. And do you have a friend that hired Morgan and Morgan. Well, guess what? That's a power move.

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Now, this loops us right back to the earlier question. Where do these workers come from? Because a project like this at this scale, it needs more than just like, you know, 10 genius stone masons. Like you need something bigger than that. Now, here's the thing. The Inca at this time didn't really have money.

Now, I don't mean that. that they were broke, they were very wealthy. In their society, they didn't have coins or cash or any type of currency. Instead, what they did have is they taxed people in labor. So this was a system that they called Mita. Basically, communities from all across the empire were required to send able-bodied people for set periods of time to go work on basically state building projects. So roads and bridges and terraces and palaces like this.

And while they worked, they got fed and supplied straight out of the state storehouses. Then when their shift was up, they went home and then a new group would get sent in. And that is how you build across an empire of millions of people without ever having to pay a single wage. Some people look at this and they're like, it's indentured servitude. Maybe it's, you know, slavery. But it's like these people, this was their tax, so to speak, that, hey, for this period of time, you got to go work for the state and then you call it off.

So you basically just turn an entire population into a workforce that you can summon in shifts and you take care of them more or less while they're on. the job. So it's not literally abusive slave labor. So the how question of Machu Picchu, right? Buried engineering, layered terraces, this hidden water system, bronze tools, an empire-sized labor machine that could just feed men into the system to build this stuff like over decades. But who were the people that were actually living up there like walking these roads every day? Well, for about 100 years, the story that we told about them was almost certainly completely wrong. So first thing, there weren't really crowds. Like I said, Machu Picchu was never some like packed

city on a mountaintop. So judging by the buildings that are still standing, it probably never held more than like 750 people at any one time. And honestly, for most of the year, it's probably way, way less than that. So there was probably a core group of maybe a few hundred people who actually live there year round. And they would keep this entire estate running. And then the population would only swell when the emperor and the rest of his royal court would come up for, you know, that specific. season. So it was like a big royal household, not a city. You can almost think of like, you know, the Chateau of Versailles. But who were these permanent residents? So this is where the history gets kind of embarrassing, at least for the people that initially wrote it. So when the site's early

excavators dug up the graves back in like the 1910s, they took a look at the skeletons and decided that most of them were actually women. And that from one reading, this whole theory is kind of like blossom. The idea that Machu Picchu was maybe like a type of convent, like a sacred retreat for what they called the virgins of the sun, like chosen women that were specifically picked for some reason to live apart from the world in this kind of like beautiful kind of nunnery, so to speak. And it was a beautiful story and it actually was in history books for decades, but based off further research, it's probably wrong. Because later on, more careful reexaminations of those exact same bones flipped the conclusions. The sexual

identifications were off and the whole like convent idea just stopped. So, what happened? What's the actual truth? Well, let's imagine an ordinary day up on the ridge. You've got smoke coming up from the kitchens, you know, foods getting prepared for the household for like a big feast. People are working on the terraces and they're, you know, fixing up the water channels and they're weaving cloth and they're shaping and repairing pottery and like these bronze tools. And they're keeping the building, you know, up and going, getting everything ready for when the king and the court officially arrives. And of course, performing the rituals that kept a dead emperor's estate like spiritually intact. And then when the time came, they would bury their own dead and cemeteries

along the edges of this site. Now, when researchers studied these remains, a lot of these people had apparently lived pretty decently into old age. Like, they didn't really have strong signs of malnutrition or disease or injuries from any type of warfare or like the wear and tear you'd expect from like crushing labor. So these were not work-to-death slaves that were buried here. Even if they were a servant class, they had some type of comfortable, stable life. So where do they all come from? Well, for the longest time, people basically assumed that they knew the answer. The thinking was like this.

These were local people, right? These were highlanders of the Andes Mountains, people from right around there, from the Incan Heartland itself, because that would make the most sense. A remote royal estate tucked up in the mountains, you'd figure you would just get locals that would live around the area, that knew the area, that knew the horticulture of the mountains. and they would just kind of live in the palace. They assumed a pretty homogenous group. Everybody from the same corner of the world,

kind of just like any normal village in the region. And for a long time, that was the default picture, but it doesn't seem to be the case. So in 2023, this whole story got rewritten. When an international team pulled genome-wide data from 34 people buried at the site, and the answer basically switched up what everyone thought they knew because that tiny little community was extremely,

extremely diverse. The people buried there carried ancestry from across the empire, the Indian Highlands, the Peruvian coast, all the way to Lake Titicaca region. And then the most surprising part, about a third of them actually had significant Amazonian ancestry, traced all the way to the lowland forests east of the mountain. And here's another interesting little thing about that. Hardly any of them were related. So it seems like they arrived as individuals, not as like full-on families, not as a whole village. And they were buried side by side with no cemetery split up based on where anyone came from. Now, these facts about who these people were and what kind of lives that they lived and what their bones really

looked like and where they came from, that is what makes the story bigger than Machu Picchu, and it becomes about the entire Inca empire itself. Because all this diversity does not mean that Machu Picchu is like some free-flowing, multicultural like melting pot where people were wandering in from all over. It's actually the opposite. And here's why. These were what they call Yanakona people who were permanently bound to serve a royal household. And a lot of them had been relocated far from their home by the empire's own resettlement policies. So some of the women may even have been former Akla, which are the chosen women that we mentioned earlier. So the overall picture that researchers are seeing here is a small cemetery on a remote ridge filled with people that the

empire had basically collected from distances spanning the entire continent of South America, all aimed at a single job, which is keeping this dead king's estate alive and running. But there is a clarification. These graves hold just the servants. That's the most fascinating part. None of the masters or the nobility are actually buried here. Because the emperor, the guy that we attribute the entire building project, Pachikuti, all his relatives and himself and his honored guests, they lived primarily and were buried in Kusko, in the capital.

which, if you ask me, actually makes the servants the more interesting part of the story because those are the people that the whole place was built by, not just the ones that it was built for. And then within just a few generations, every last one of them was gone. And right at this moment where we want to know what happens next, Machu Picchu goes quiet. Because here's the essential thing about Machu Picchu. It could not survive on its own. It was never truly self-sufficient. The whole estate ran on the empire, on the conchipi. constant flow of Mita labor and resettled retainers and food and tribute, all of it getting pumped up the mountain from the outside. Basically, it was a luxury that only a working empire could afford.

So if you take away the support system, there's just no way to keep a royal palace alive, even for a dead king, especially way out on that isolated ridge. And that's almost certainly what happened. So in 1532, Francisco Pizarro landed with his men and the Inca world just came apart. There was a war between rival heirs plus, of course, waves of European disease tearing through people who had zero immunity and then invasion.

The empire that fed Machu Picchu and supported it just collapsed all around it. Now, again, just to be nuanced here because there's a simple way to wrap up the story, like, okay, the Spanish showed up and Machu Picchu was just abandoned, but that's probably not what happened because honestly, there's no sign

that the Spanish ever even found the site. Like, we have no evidence that they ever visited at all. Like there's no destruction layer. There's no evidence of a siege or a fire. There's no bodies that were killed. There's no documentation anywhere ordering some kind of evacuation. So whatever ended life up here, it probably wasn't a battle. So what does the evidence actually suggest? Mostly it tells us that the place was just kind of let go. Not destroyed, but like released over time. And that distinction moves us from like, why do they abandon? to a different question, did everyone leave all at once or was it just like slowly bleeding out?

And you've got to think about it logistically. The labor draft dries up. All of a sudden, you're not taxing people with labor. You don't have people coming up as like a tribute. The supply lines are probably getting cut off from Kusko. And the whole royal purpose just evaporated. And the lineage that actually owned it was either scattered or died of disease. And that's the most likely answer, that when the machine that actually kept Machu Picchu running just kind of stopped, the reason to be there and the means in order to stay there just disappeared. And so the people who could leave had to leave. And the mountain in the forest just did the rest. And by the way, exactly how a few hundred Spaniards managed to topple an entire empire of millions

of people. That is a different story that we touched on a little bit in the episode I did with Luke Cavern. So you should absolutely check that out. But we'll save that for a different episode. Now, I mentioned a little bit earlier that the Spanish never found Machu Picchu. So that claim, is exactly true. Well, let me tell you like a little funny clue that's actually buried in the stone. So on the site, there's this carved granite feature called the Antimitana. And honestly, we're not really sure what it was for. The top theories say that it's like a solar marker tied to a calendar or it's like a ritual focal point in a sacred landscape. But the bottom line is that no one really knows. But what we do know is that the Spanish went around the entire empire. And more or less just

smashed stones exactly like this one, wherever they found them. They treated them as idols and basically destroyed all of these kind of sacred stones. But the Atiwatana at Machu Picchu survived, completely intact. And that is one of the best pieces of evidence that we actually have to believe that the conquistadors never actually made it up that ridge. But, you know, the Spanish never documented it is also not the same thing as nobody knew it was there. Because the families that live down in the valley, they certainly never lost track of it. As the empire's memory faded, and the jungle kind of came creeping over the terraces and the site sort of slipped out of the wider world's knowledge.

The people living right nearby always knew exactly where it was, which makes the next part of the story so absurd because roughly four centuries later, a stranger is going to climb up the ridge and take one look at the place that local families are actively farming and then announced to the entire world that he just discovered a lost city that no one knew existed. So the morning of July 24th, 1911, it's cold,

It's obviously very rainy. And down on the Urabamba Valley, there's this lecturer from Yale. He's named Hiram Bingham. And he is this charismatic, ambitious, like, discoverer. You know, and he's desperate for a big discovery, trying to make a name for himself. And here's the crazy thing. He's not even looking for Machu Picchu. He was actually hunting for a completely different place.

This place called Vilcabamba. This is this legendary last stronghold where the final Inca holdouts had really, resisted Spanish rule. So he's going around the region and he finds a local farmer, this guy named Meltshor Arteaga. And he basically goes out to him and he's like, hey, can I pay you one soul, like a dollar basically to guide him up this ridge? And together with a Peruvian sergeant, they cross the Urabamba on this flimsy little bridge, just like logs kind of like lashed together with vines. And they start climbing this ridge that is so deep and so foggy that Bingham later admitted that he half expected the entire trip to just be a waste of time. And at the very top,

Arteaga just kind of hands him off. And the person who actually walks Hiram Bingham into the so-called lost city of the Incas is an 11-year-old boy. Literally just a kid named Pablo Rechart. And he knew where to go because his family lived there. Yeah, Rechart and the Alvarez families were farming Machu Picchu's terraces and pulling water from a still-working Inca Canal on the very same day that this famous explorer showed up to discover this land that no one knew was there. So discovery is the wrong word and of course it gets worse. Because nearly a decade earlier, back in 1902, a farmer named Augustine Lazaraga had reached these ruins also and carved his own name into the walls of one of the temples. Like a tourist kind of like signing a book like, yo, Augustine was here.

The site even showed up in a printed assort. Atlas in 1904, seven years before Bingham ever set foot in Peru. And his private journal, Bingham himself actually credited Lazaraga as the initial discover before quietly kind of demoting the guy to like a footnote in the same books that went on to make Hiram Bingham famous. And Lazaraga never even got the chance to argue about it because he actually drowned in the Urumbamba only a few months after Bingham came through. Now, to be fair to Hiram Bingham, his impact on Machu Picchu was legit.

I mean, the research was very real. His photographs and his excavations and his partnership with National Geographic were all very legit. He was the first guy who helped the entire world learn about Machu Picchu at all. So while he wasn't really like the person to discover a lost land that no one knew where it was, the lost city of the Incas, all that stuff, he was kind of the person who dragged it into the global spotlight. But almost everything that he concluded about it was wrong. Like I said, he actually spent years convinced that this was actually. Vicklebamba, the city that he was looking for, but it wasn't. He was looking for that last refuge of the Inca, and it's actually placed at a totally different site that now we call Espiritu Pampa,

which ironically Bingham had actually passed nearby and just sort of dismissed like, oh, that's nothing. So he may have even gotten the name wrong, because in 2022, a historian named Donato Amado Gonzalez and an archaeologist named Brian Bauer went digging through Bingham's own field notes and his maps and 16th century Spanish land records, and they made a pretty striking discovery. And they argued that the Inca probably never called the place Machu Picchu at all. You see, that's actually the name of the taller mountain that's looming over the site. But the settlement itself was probably called Wainapichu, which means that the entire world now uses the wrong name, probably just as a labeling accident, one that Bingham kind of locked into

all the way back in 1911. Now, again, that's just a theory. That's one argument. It's not case closed, but the whole naming question is still up for debate. But even the possibility is kind of funny, right? Like, we might not even know the true name of one of the most famous ruins on planet Earth. And honestly, that's not even the last of Bingham's accidents, because his expeditions hauled thousands of artifacts and even human remains off the mountain and then shipped them back to Yale for study, which actually kicked off a bitter decades-long fight with the government of Peru, who, I mean, actually like owned all the stuff. And Yale didn't start returning these collections until 2011.

And honestly, that whole saga with Hiram Bingham is just a mess. It's just a messy sort of discovery myth of Machu Picchu. You know, you have this outsider who shows it to a place that's already known and mapped and farmed and slaps his name on it. And it was currently being lived in the entire time. And then kind of wrote everyone who was already living there and had actually taken them there out of the picture. So here's what sticks to me about all of that. Everyone in recent, you know, modern history looked at the mountain and they wanted it to be something else. People were like, it's a lost city.

It's actually the last siege of the English. It's a refuge. It's a fortress. It's a convent. It was obviously built by aliens. And one by one, the mountain slowly just kind of like disproves every one of these theories. Because the Marvel of Machu Picchu isn't even the mysteries or the things that we don't know about it. The marvel is the things that we do know. It's the stones that are cut so precisely that they haven't shifted in 500 years, that they were able to withstand earthquakes, like the hidden skeletons and the drains and the foundation holding this whole ridge together, tear. parrises raised by people gathered from across an entire continent whose names will probably never know.

Remember, as far as we know, it was originally built to keep a dead king's memory and power and legacy alive forever. And even that theory might get rewritten at some point. And now, I mean, that king is gone, his lineage is gone, the empire is gone. Even his name might be wrong. But still, in 2007, the world voted Machu Picchu as one of the new seven wonders of the world. They still say this is a a beautiful marvel and they put a crown on it at a place that we still don't really know anything about and after 500 years of earthquakes and landslides and rain and everything else machu pechu is still standing i mean if you ask me the legacy of this place kind of belongs to all the people the whole people who built it lost a time who many of which are still up there in the clouds keeping its secrets at

Machu Picchu. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief history on the Marvel of Machu Picchu, aka Why Not Peachu? I mean, what an amazing. I want to go so badly. Apparently it's pretty tough. Like, there was a time, I think, like, if you were to go in, like, the 90s, even, like, early 2000s, you can kind of just, like, pull up. Like, there was, like, local guides that would kind of just, like, take you and you can just kind of, like, go check it out. But now it's, like, ticketed. The tickets sell out really quick. It's, like, a lot of, like, foreign dignitaries can go. Like, it's a little bit more capped because they don't want people just like carving their names in the walls like that guy augustin did but i mean it's it's a beautiful place i mean could you even pull up some of those

pictures you had on the screen earlier i mean this is uh oh yeah you you like this one you like lake ticaca you know i couldn't let you get away with that what do you mean how do you pronounce it how do you pronounce it it actually is tcaca yeah that's what i'm saying dude titicaca it's almost like one of the kids named yeah you think it was pablo the 11 year old bull that led him into how crazy that that guy lived as a kid if you interviewed him at like 25 years old you're like oh yeah where'd you grow up he's like you're not going to believe it i grew up in like a sacred sanctuary of an ink and king and i that's where i that's where i spend my childhood i mean it's crazy it's like the most insane looking place and people just lived there like they

lived there in the 1900s it's pretty dope imagine waking up and seeing that every morning that was your whole life. I mean, it's crazy to like long for a life that I never lived, but I really do. I feel deep nostalgia for a reality that is so different from my own. And it's weird that I truly empathize with that kid. I'm like, dude, Pablo had such an awesome life. What is, what an awesome, I mean, so crazy. Good for Pablo. I actually, I wonder what happened to him. Like, that's something that I actually forgot to look up, like when we were doing the research. But like, I would love to know where Pablo Rechart is today. That's actually worth of Google. Let me look

that up. I mean, it's crazy. The families were just living there. They probably lived up there. Again, I'm like trying to find it, but I can't find like a hard number. But I imagine they probably lived up there probably until like the 1920s or 30s. Just like posted up, just living a quiet life farming, hanging

out, playing on a waterfall, enjoying the rain. Don't get any ideas. Let's move this whole thing to Machupeachia. That I'm okay with. That's what I'm saying. How sick would that be? Machu Picchu or like Pennsylvania. Yeah. We go to the woods of Pennsylvania. What do you think?

Quaker town. Yeah. See? Now you're getting the Vision, Christos. What do you guys think? Have you guys ever been there? Any Peruvians that are watching that actually have spent time in Machu Picchu?

Do you have any crazy stories of what it was like before it became like a heritage site or whatever? I would love to know. Like tell me a story of like your grandma going up there as like a kid, like running around. That's the stuff I love. Or if you've just been there as a tourist, like what was your experience like? I had a friend that went and his whole like, whole like you basically go up in like a rickshaw thing like a little like three wheel like motorcycle almost like a moped situation and they tipped and like they fell off like you basically go up in like a

zigzag kind of thing and they fell off and landed on like the bottom one like a 20 foot fall and like one of the guys got super hurt but like they were all okay it's crazy it's like even if you go today as like a tourist like it's safe but it's a little treacherous crazy if you guys have any stories like or any other thoughts or theories around Machupeachia. Matter of fact, I'm pretty sure Luke Caverns had a theory. I don't want to misinterpret his theory, but my understanding, and I have to go back and watch our episode to know exactly what he said,

but I think he said that he thinks that it was almost like a school or like a university. He says like there's massive like celestial kind of like rock formations that point to like a lunar calendar. He's like, I think it was probably used for like the academic elite of the time to like go and study probably at the, behest of the king. Crazy. Pretty cool.

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