Negotiations with Yale over the artifacts of Machu Picchu Peru. By Eliane Karp-Toledo – Stanford, Calif. - February 23, 2008
SURE, it seemed like a great idea when, last September, President Alan García of Peru reached a preliminary agreement with Yale about the disposition of more than 350 artifacts taken from Machu Picchu. Everyone hoped the settlement might be a break for cultural understanding in the cloudy skies of international cooperation. News reports suggested that Yale would return more than 350 museum-quality artifacts which belong to Machu Picchu, plus several thousand fragments thought to be of interest mainly to researchers — all of which were taken from the mountaintop Inca archaeological complex of the Sanctuary of Machu Picchu nearly a century ago — and that legal title to all the artifacts, even those to be left at Yale for research, would be held by Peru. http://ping.fm/9T6Kp