Ghosts of Machu Picchu Page #2

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reached an astonishing conclusion:

80 percent of the dead were women.

Eaton's data gave a sex ratio of 4 to 1,

4 times as many females as males.

Four to one really would

be a tremendous bias

and I think that's

what got Eaton excited.

He thought,

"My God, they're almost all women".

What could explain

a predominantly female cemetery?

Bingham thought he'd found the remains

Of the so-called Virgins of the Sun.

According to Spanish accounts,

the most beautiful girls in the empire

were chosen for this sacred convent.

Selected around the age of eight,

these virgins served the Inca emperor

for the rest of their lives.

Bingham guessed that when the last Inca

king retreated into the mountains

to escape the Spanish,

he took his sacred virgins with him.

So it all added up.

The skeletons of the virgins confirmed

that this spectacular city in the sky

had to be Vilcabamba.

Clearly for him, it created a great

magical romantic kind of picture that,

that made good book reading.

When published in the April 1913

issue of National Geographic,

the story was an overnight sensation.

Bingham became a star.

The only problem was

that the theory was wrong.

Investigations of other Inca ruins

revealed that the Spanish desecrated

almost every Inca

holy site they could find.

At Machu Picchu,

the entire city remained untouched.

But the most convincing

evidence against Bingham's theory

was in the very bones

he had found at the site.

When forensic anthropologist,

John Verano, re-examined them,

he found that the sex of

the skeletons was almost evenly split,

a far cry from Eaton's 4 to 1 ratio.

To figure out the sex of a skeleton,

you have to compare it

across many ethnic and racial groups.

Eaton's references were limited

to people of European or African descent.

People in the Andes are,

are relatively short, delicately built.

And I can only guess that what

he was looking at was bone size

and he said this looks like

a small person, therefore it's female.

In Bingham's collection, Verano also

found the bones of several children

and children and virgins

just didn't add up.

I just, I can't find

evidence to support that idea

that these were virgins of the sun.

I think that,

that can be pretty well ruled out.

Without the virgins

or any sign of Spanish desecration,

there was no proof to support Bingham's

theory that this was Vilcabamba.

So what was it?

With so few written records,

archeologists like Fernando Astete

must piece together clues about

Machu Picchu's history

wherever they can find them.

And he thinks he's just found one

in a nearby town called Patallacta.

Patallacta was important

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