The Toledo administration left without filing a lawsuit. As many people told me, Yale is far more affluent than Peru, and lawsuits are expensive. When the administration of Alan GarcÃa took office in July 2006, a commission (established in Toledo’s last months, but with the membership now changed) placed the matter under review. The ubiquitous Koechlin is on the commission as well. Last March, I asked Santiago Marcovich, the Foreign Ministry official who then headed the commission, if the GarcÃa government would be as adamant as Toledo’s in pursuing the claim. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. I don’t know. It’s a different way of tackling the problem. We cannot be so conflictive. Or maybe yes. It depends on the action of Yale. It is action-reaction. Peruvian law doesn’t allow us to make any concession on matters of cultural heritage.”

Choosing to be more conciliatory toward a government that might be open to compromise, Yale last month extended a new proposal to the GarcÃa administration. The university showed me two letters sent to Peruvian officials in which Yale offered to send back “the museum-quality (that is, whole) objects excavated by Bingham at Machu Picchu” for display in a “state-of-the-art museum exclusively dedicated to Machu Picchu” that would be opened in Cuzco in collaboration with Yale on the centennial anniversary of Bingham’s 1911 discovery of the site. To help raise money for the museum, Yale would resurrect its touring exhibition, which — including dioramas and ceramics — would end up permanently in Cuzco. This represents a significant concession over Yale’s past proposal to divide possession of the approximately 300 display-worthy objects. The research collection, however, would continue to reside in New Haven. “The museum-quality pieces are the ones that people will want to see,” Shailor, the deputy provost, told me. “I don’t think they will want to see the end of a little finger or five dog bones, but these are extraordinarily valuable from a research perspective.” When I spoke with him in early May, Levin said that Yale is prepared to concede Peruvian title to the entire collection, but only after the ultimate physical allocation of the objects has been negotiated. In other words, Peru’s pride will be assuaged if Yale’s research needs can be met. Whether Peru will consent to those terms — indeed, whether the GarcÃa government is at liberty to do so, legally or politically — is uncertain; but earlier this month, Peru told Yale that it was prepared to resume talks, with Housing Minister HernÃ¡n Garrido-Lecca, a former investment banker who did postgraduate work at Harvard and M.I.T., as its lead negotiator. “We have clearly stated that we would like to proceed in these negotiations, but first we would like a complete list of the pieces that were taken by Hiram Bingham in his expeditions to Peru,” Garrido-Lecca told me. “We want to have a friendly negotiation. In the end, we would like to have every piece in Peru, of course. But we would like to have a long-term relationship with Yale. We have a totally different attitude toward this matter than the previous administration.”

Burger and Salazar say they acknowledge the return of the museum-quality objects to Peru as a painful inevitability. (Salazar winced when I mentioned an attractive pair of dishes decorated with butterflies.) For both of them, but especially for Salazar, who is currently conducting an inventory, the Bingham collection has provided an outstanding career opportunity. If the dispute is amicably resolved, their hope is that Yale and Peru will collaborate on educational and scientific programs in the future. Yale officials would also like to borrow, for display on a rotating basis in the Peabody museum, objects that Bingham excavated at Machu Picchu. “We would want to continue some presence, because it is an important part of the Peabody’s history,” Shailor told me. “Hiram Bingham is such an extraordinary figure.” She paused almost imperceptibly, and added, “For his age.”

Many of the Peruvians who are clamoring for the return of the Yale collection belittle Bingham’s achievement. “It is increasingly evident that Bingham did not ‘discover’ Machu Picchu,” Flores, the Cuzco anthropologist, told me. “The place was not too far away from Cuzco. It is within a known farm, Cutija. Machu Picchu was always known by the CuzqueÃ±os, especially by farmers of that area.” Flores speaks with authority. He comes from a leading Cuzco family, and his maternal grandfather acquired the farm opposite Cutija in 1890. Flores says that the rector of the University of Cuzco informed Bingham of the whereabouts of Machu Picchu. And, obviously, the local farmers knew of it: the child of one farmer escorted Bingham to the site, where the American explorer, far from being in terra incognita, photographed graffiti that had been scrawled by another farmer. “Because we are getting close to the centenary of the discovery, it has brought up a debate on who really discovered Machu Picchu,” Flores continued. “After the people see that CuzqueÃ±os knew about it, they say: ‘Who is Bingham? He didn’t discover the pieces. He was told. And why does Yale have it? They should give it back. Because he did not discover Machu Picchu. On the contrary, he was someone who took things from Machu Picchu.’ ”

The notion that Bingham did not really discover Machu Picchu is set forth at the Machu Picchu site museum, where the wall labels pointedly state that “this place was not unknown to the local inhabitants.” Fernando Astete, an archaeologist who has worked at the Machu Picchu park since 1978 and been director of it since 2001, wants the Bingham collection to be exhibited at the site’s museum. When I spoke with him in Cuzco, he said: “I am happy with the museum. It has temperature control and humidity control and guards.” But when I visited the site museum, which is located about a mile and a half from the Aguas Calientes train station, I found evidence of none of those amenities. The doors were open to the air, which was moist from the nearby river, and the sole official was a caretaker who sold tickets and then exited the building. On display in the attractive (if unguarded) museum are the finds that Peruvian archaeologists have made at Machu Picchu in the years since Bingham’s excavations. “In the last 30 years, we have found a good collection — ceramics, metal, stone, spondylus shells, very few textiles,” Astete said. “We also have found tombs that Bingham didn’t find.” The Machu Picchu museum contains fewer intact ceramics than are at the Yale Peabody. There is, however, one unique object: a gold bracelet found in 1995, the only gold ever uncovered at the site. It was located in the loose-fill foundation of a plaza, most likely placed there as an offering during construction.

Burger and other scholars believe there was no gold for Bingham to find at Machu Picchu because the royal family would take precious objects back to Cuzco when they left the estate. During his lifetime, however, Bingham was plagued by rumors that he had smuggled gold out of Machu Picchu through Bolivia. Those rumors persist. I heard them myself in Peru, from people who told me that their grandparents witnessed Bingham’s caravans laden with mysterious material, heading east for the border to evade export controls.

Such gossip is wishful thinking. By the time Bingham came to Peru, there was very little Inca gold remaining anywhere in the world. It vanished centuries earlier. When Francisco Pizarro seized Atahualpa in 1532 and held him hostage, the Inca ordered his subjects to collect a ransom. The obedient populace stripped the enormous gleaming panels and other lavish embellishments from the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, which were a legacy of Pachacuti. They dismantled an artificial garden of sculptures of corn, flowers and birds, all realistically made with precious metals. They conveyed vases, idols, drums, pots, altars, fountains, masks and other creations of the finest goldsmiths — the tribute that this great and isolated civilization had paid to its gods and rulers. The chronicles record the steady arrival of prodigious quantities of gold, which the conquerors stored alongside their prisoner. All for naught. The Spanish executed Atahualpa anyway and melted down the treasure to ship home. As I talked to people in Peru about the Bingham collection, this tragic history was always flickering in the background. The Spanish ships heavy with plunder sailed from Peru long ago. The patrimony is irretrievable, the Spaniards unaccountable. Yet the drama continues to play out, like a recurring nightmare or a neurotic repetition compulsion, within Peru today. Precious objects that remain in Peru — things far more beautiful than the Machu Picchu crockery — are still being extracted at a horrifying rate. In many parts of the country, especially along the coast, tomb-robbing is a major industry: the huaqueros sell the plundered antiquities to middlemen for placement with rich collectors in Lima or abroad. The dispute with Yale is a sideshow.

Historic relics have pragmatic value: politically, for purposes of national pride and partisan advantage; economically, for display to tourists, museumgoers, magazine readers and TV-program watchers; scientifically, as research material for scholars pursuing academic careers; and, most nakedly, as merchandise for dealers in antiquities. In comparing the arguments and motivations of the different claimants to the Yale collection, I often identified with historians of the Inca trying to untangle those Spanish chronicles that were spun from the tales of native informants with their own purposes. The people at Yale say that they have preserved the collection as a legacy of a great civilization and they want to continue to study these artifacts to learn more about that culture. They are also paying tribute to one of the most colorful and glamorous figures in the university’s history. The Peruvians celebrate their own legendary ancestor when they describe the urgency of their case, but they also have very down-to-earth political and commercial uses for the collection. “Cultural patrimony” — the phrase sounds so otherworldly. Bingham and Pachacuti were both very practical men. They would not have been fooled for a minute.