LIMA, PERU—According to a statement released by the University of Illinois Chicago, historian Donato Amado Gonzales of Peru’s Ministry of Culture and archaeologist Brian S. Bauer of the University of Illinois Chicago examined nineteenth-century maps, seventeenth-century documents, and field notes taken by American explorer Hiram Bingham, and found that the fifteenth-century citadel we now know as Machu Picchu may have been called Picchu, or Huayna Picchu, by the Inca. Accounts written by Spanish invaders in the late sixteenth century, Gonzales and Bauer added, noted that local people planned to return to a place they called Huayna Picchu. This was also the name applied to the mountain closest to the city, while Machu Picchu is the name of the area’s tallest mountain, the researchers explained. To read about another Inca site, go to "Idol of the Painted Temple."
