LIMA, Peru - The jungle-shrouded Inca citadel of Machu Picchu may have been rediscovered - and looted - decades before the Yale scholar credited with the find first got there, a researcher said Thursday.
Most academics say Yale University's Hiram Bingham III rediscovered the site in Peru's verdant southeastern Andes in a 1911 expedition.
However, Paolo Greer, a retired Alaska oil pipeline foreman, says otherwise. Thirty years of digging through files in the United States and Peru led him to maps and documents showing that a German businessman named Augusto R. Berns got there first.
Berns purchased land across from Machu Picchu in 1867, and an 1887 document even shows he set up a company to plunder the site, Greer said.
Berns wrote that Machu Picchu "will undoubtedly contain objects of great value, and form part of those treasures of the Incas," Greer said.
Peruvian historian Mariana Mould de Pease backs Greer's claim. She said she found in Yale University archives a letter of understanding between Berns and Peru's then-president to pillage the site, as long as the Peruvian government received 10 percent of the profits.
"He was a scammer," Greer said of Berns. "He was trying to get money."
Greer said he uncovered other documents showing that Berns, an engineer, had previously set up a gold mining company near Machu Picchu, even though the granite cliffs in the area hold little, if any, gold.
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