Cradle of Gold

'Full of intriguing detail and carefully researched, this is a fitting testimony to one of the greatest of American explorers.' - Hugh Thomson, author of The White Rock. 'Cradle of Gold brilliantly tells the story of how Hiram Bingham revealed Machu Picchu to the world. Chris Heaney combines dogged research with a gift for storytelling and a historian's rich and nuanced understanding of his subject's times. Bingham emerges as a complex, even tragic figure who, for all his faults, generated real excitement about Peru's past as no one had before.  Heaney beautifully and skillfully captures the cultural clash between Bingham and his Peruvian hosts, without for a moment losing the momentum of this gripping story.  The result is an immensely compelling tale of exploration and exploitation that has waited nearly a century for the right chronicler. In Chris Heaney, Bingham's story has finally found it.'-Roger Atwood, author of Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World "An unforgettable journey into the heart of Peru's past that takes the reader on a hunt for the lost cities of the Incas, the famous Machu Picchu among them.  It's also a sensitively written portrait of Hiram Bingham, one of the last great explorers of our time - a man set on fulfilling his destiny - and a judicious historical account of the disenfranchisement of the Peruvian people, who had their heritage stolen by those claiming to protect it."-Peter Nichols, author of Final Voyage and A Voyage for Madmen 'Cradle of Gold illuminates Bingham's stunning and controversial discovery-and singular life-with gripping pacing and vivid detail. The book's young author, Christopher Heaney, is a notable discovery in his own right.'-Jim Rasenberger, Author of America, 1908 'Hiram Bingham's excavation of Machu Picchu in the early twentieth century is one of the most intriguing stories in a crowded era of exploration.'-Candice Millard, author of The River of Doubt 'Cradle of Gold is a wonderfully moving account of those who invented and reinvented three cities nestled deep in the eastern slopes of the Peruvian Andes: Vitcos, Vilcabamba, and Machu Picchu. It is also a subtle, penetrating study of the imperial hubris of early twenty-century US archeology as it traces the origins of Yale's misbegotten collections of Peruvian 'antiquities.' It is a powerfully argued ethical call for the 'skulls and bones' of hundreds of both humble and powerful Andeans to be returned to Peru, to their original, ancient, resting grounds, not to museums of natural history where they do not belong.' - Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin, author of Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700