Machu Picchu may not have been called Machu Picchu

Hard blow for the lost city.

Machu Picchu is today the most famous site in the Inca world and one of the most visited archaeological sites in Peru.

However, despite all the exoticism that its name inspires, the city that touches the clouds from the top of the Peruvian Andes would have had a different name in the 15th-16th centuries.

Not Machu Picchu but Huayna Picchu.

The name, preserved and passed down for centuries, was as well known as the site.

At least that is what two specialists of this pre-Columbian empire and of the city which, in the end, would never have been really "lost", believe they have discovered.

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"There is growing evidence that calls into question the connection between the name Machu Picchu and the remains

," reports a study in the

.

Led by historian Donato Amado Gonzalez (Pontifical Catholic University of Peru) and archaeologist Brian Bauer (University of Illinois at Chicago), the investigation carried out on various archival documents and old maps revealed that the The traditional toponym of the site, mentioned by historical sources, corresponded exclusively to Huayna Picchu, before its exploration in 1911 by the American historian Hiram Bingham.

The city found

of Spanish sources from the middle of the 16th century and is taken up unchanged in the following centuries, up to a modern atlas published in 1904.

, specified Brian Bauer for the British daily newspaper

.

," summarized Donato Amado Gonzalez for the American public media NPR.

Hiram Bingham in 1911, in the middle of the monumental remains of the Inca city which he nicknamed, perhaps incorrectly, Machu Picchu.

Granger/Bridgeman Pictures

From which pre-Columbian rock below did the current toponym of Machu Picchu arise?

This is not attested before Hiram Bingham's publications about his lost city.

According to the notes of his expedition, consulted by the researchers, the name of the site would have been indicated to him by his guide, Melchor Arteaga, a farmer living in the valley located at the foot of the citadel.

The explorer's other Peruvian contacts had nevertheless spoken to him of an Inca place called Huayna Picchu, directing his expedition straight towards the eponymous mountains.

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As the researchers point out, the Inca archaeological site is located on the ridge running between two mountain peaks: Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu, whose highest points rise respectively to 3082 and 2720 meters.

The name may evoke in historians the memory of the Inca emperor Huayna Capac (or Wayna Kapaq, according to the transcriptions), who reigned between 1493 and the 1520s. The site is not, however, directly associated with him.

The two are content to share the Quechua word "Huayna", meaning "young";

"young king" for Huayna Capac, and "young peak" for Huayna Picchu.

The latter thus faced its more imposing elder, the "old summit" of Machu Picchu.

A German, Augusto R. Berns, had purchased a piece of land in the area in the 1860s and may have even looted the ruins.

Jorge Flores, in an interview with the BBC, in 2011.

Located at more than 2400 meters in the province of Urubamba, nearly 70 kilometers from Cuzco, the Inca palatial city was surveyed by Hiram Bingham in July 1911. The same expedition, decidedly successful, brought the explorer and his traveling companions on the remains of other Inca cities, those of Vitcos and Vilcabamba.

So many "discoveries", the stories of which ignite the imagination of the European public.

historian Christopher Heaney

suggested in 2010 for

The explorer returns several times to the site and publishes, in 1948,

Apart from the question of its original name, which may therefore never have been lost, Machu Picchu could also have been explored by Europeans long before the scientific mission led by Hiram Bingham.

,” remarked in 2011, for the BBC, the ethnologist emeritus Jorge Flores (deceased in 2020).

Can we imagine Peru renaming the historic site again?

Donato Amado Gonzalez tempers.

In one case as in the other, the Incas will not make much of it.