Ghosts of Machu Picchu

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High in the Peruvian Andes, there's

an ancient city called Machu Picchu.

lt is a ruin that defies explanation.

Who were the mysterious people who built

it and why did they build it here?

With no defensive wall,

it doesn't look like a fortress.

instead, there are fountains

and small pools...

temples...

and strange altars cut from granite...

...but little else

to explain how a people

who didn't have iron tools or the wheel

could have created

such a masterpiece...and why.

Now, new research

is solving these mysteries...

in the bodies and bones

of the people who once lived here...

To me this is the type of injury

more indicative of a weapon...

possibly of warfare.

There are clues far below the city...

and underneath it...

...and in the stories

of the mummies of kings.

Will all these revelations finally

lay the ghosts of Machu Picchu to rest?

Perched at 2,450 meters

on a narrow ridge in the high Andes

Machu Picchu is a remote

and mysterious ancient wonder.

Spread across the top of this ridge

are more than 200 structures

each built with exquisitely cut stone.

Some appear to be homes...others temples.

They surround a hectare green...

and all are fed

by open waterways and fountains.

It is a lost city, whose doorways and

passages hint at the ghosts of its past.

A place that is

at once beautiful and baffling.

There are no written clues in the city...

no carvings to suggest a purpose.

At its highest point,

the mystery only deepens.

There,

a beautifully carved pillar stands,

a graceful riddle to cap the site.

From this lofty height, the views

leave one stunned, but also curious.

How did the builders

get all this stone up here

and then cut it so finely

that they didn't even need mortar

to hold their walls in place?

Who built Machu Picchu?

And why did they build it

in this impossible place?

Even more perplexing,

why did they abandon it?

Throughout the city,

stones seemed to be on the verge

of being placed when work came to a stop.

Now, as never before, clues are emerging.

Some at the site

itself in new excavations.

Others at the lower

reaches of Machu Picchu

as teams explore them

for the very first time.

These mysteries have long

obsessed Fernando Astete,

director of the Machu Picchu

Archaeological Park.

There is such an important cultural legacy

here, not just for Peruvians,

but a legacy forthe entire world.

Making sense of that legacy is Astete's

challenge-along with getting to work.

He has one of the most precarious

commutes of anyone on the planet.

His path was built by a people

who were sure-footed with little fear

of heights

the Inca.

They rose to power in the mid-1400s in

part because they built such good roads.

Much of their 16,000 kilometer

network is still visible today.

They left other evidence that they

were master engineers and builders.

Their terraces, canals and stone

cities rival those of ancient Rome.

But unlike the ancient Romans,

they did all of this without the wheel,

without iron and without

a written language.

The Inca did have a calculating system

using knotted strings called khipu,

but it left no record

of their lives or their history.

So, much of what

we do know comes from the Spanish

who conquered them in the 1500s.

These accounts carry

the bias of conquerors.

A different view comes from

an Inca artist named Guaman Poma.

Poma was born shortly after the Spanish

arrived in Peru so he was

an observer who bridged both worlds.

He produced hundreds of simple

drawings about farming techniques,

royalty and the Inca history of conquest.

From both these sources,

we know the Inca were fierce warriors who

subjugated dozens of different peoples,

forging them into one

of the largest empires in the world,

stretching some 3800 kilometers.

They fed their people

by transforming steep slopes

into farmland with

the rise and run of terracing.

It's believed that more land was

under cultivation during Inca times

than is today in modern Peru.

But the most surprising

detail about the Inca

is that they ruled for only 100 years.

Then their empire was decimated,

first by disease, then civil war,

finally the Spanish Conquistadors.

From the Spanish, we know that

the last Inca emperor retreated into

the mountains,

to a city called Vilcabamba.

The Inca held out at Vilcabamba

for 35 years, until, finally,

in 1572 the Spanish destroyed the city.

Strangely, they left no written

record of where it was located...

and the legend of the lost

city of Vilcabamba was born.

It was a mystery

that had powerful allure.

Almost 350 years later,

it pulled an American explorer named

Hiram Bingham here on a quest to find it.

On the morning of July 24, 191 1 ,

Bingham, camera at the ready, reached the

top of a ridge and stepped into history.

"lt fairly took my breath away",

he later wrote.

Bingham's photos marked

one of the first times

that a moment of discovery

had been captured on film.

Today, those pictures are part

of a rare 23-volume explorer's

album detailing Bingham's discovery.

But what, exactly, had he found?

He called it by its local name

Machu Picchu, but he thought

it was the lost city of Vilcabamba.

A year later, when his team

discovered over 100 burials,

Bingham believed he'd found

the evidence to make his case.

After thorough examination, Bingham

and his bone expert, Dr. George Eaton,

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,

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