Working with new evidence and a trove of re-examined relics, many of them recovered from the basement of a museum in Connecticut, archaeologists have revised their thinking about the significance of Macchu Picchu, the most famous "lost city'' of the Inca. The new interpretation comes more than 90 years after the explorer Hiram Bingham III bushwhacked his way to a high ridge in the Andes of Peru and beheld a dreamscape out of the pre-Columbian past. The expression ``lost city,'' popularized by Bingham, was the magical elixir for rundown imaginations in the summer of 1911, evoking the romanticism of exploration. But finding Macchu Picchu proved to be easier than solving the mystery of its place in the Inca empire, arguably the richest and most powerful in the New World when Europeans arrived. The imposing architecture attested to the skill and audacity of the Incas. But who had lived at this isolated site and for what purpose?Bingham, a historian at Yale University, advanced three hypotheses -- all of them dead wrong. The spectacular site was not, as Bingham supposed, the traditional birthplace of the Inca people or the final stronghold of the Incas in their losing struggle against Spanish conquest in the 16th century. Nor was it a sacred spiritual center occupied by chosen women, the ``virgins of the sun,'' and presided over by priests who worshiped the sun god.
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