Manuel Chávez Ballón Site Museum

This guide to the Manuel Chavez Ballon Site Museum in Aguas Calientes follows the archaeologist who spent from 1966 to 1971 excavating Machu Picchu itself, filling these cases with pottery shards, bone fragments and stone tools. It traces the harder fight behind his career, against the forty thousand objects Hiram Bingham had shipped to Yale University decades earlier on what was meant to be an eighteen-month loan. Chavez Ballon, who guided archaeologists to unrecorded ruins as a teenager growing up in Puno, spent his later years pressing for those objects to come home.