Museo Machu Picchu Casa Concha

This guide to the Museo Machu Picchu Casa Concha in Cusco opens with a promise Hiram Bingham made to the Peruvian government in nineteen eleven: eighteen months to study the ceramics, bronze pins, and human remains he was shipping to Yale out of Machu Picchu. It follows the decades that promise stretched into, as Peru asked for its collection back as early as nineteen twenty and was refused again and again, until the dispute reached Peru's own president marching through the streets of Lima. Along the way it traces this building's own layered past, an Inca palace seized after the conquest, later an army barracks and a police station, before it became the museum you are standing in.