Professions

Hiram Bingham, formally Hiram Bingham III, (November 19, 1875 – June 6, 1956) was an American academic, explorer and politician. He rediscovered the Inca settlement of Machu Picchu in 1911.

Bingham was not a trained archaeologist. Yet, it was during Bingham’s time as a lecturer – later professor – at Yale that he discovered the largely forgotten Inca city of Machu Picchu. In 1908, he had served as delegate to the First Pan American Scientific Congress at Santiago, Chile. On his way home via Peru, a local prefect convinced him to visit the pre-Columbian city of Choquequirao. Bingham published an account of this trip in Across South America; an account of a journey from Buenos Aires to Lima by way of Potosí, with notes on Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru (1911).

Bingham was thrilled by the prospect of unexplored Inca cities, and in 1911 returned to the Andes with the Yale Peruvian Expedition of 1911. On 24 July 1911, Melchor Arteaga led Bingham to Machu Picchu, which had been largely forgotten by everybody except the small number of people living in the immediate valley (possibly including two local missionaries named Thomas Payne and Stuart McNairn whose descendants claim that they had already climbed to the ruins in 1906).

Bingham returned to Peru in 1912 and 1915 with the support of Yale and the National Geographic Society.

Machu Picchu has become one of the major tourist attractions in South America, and Bingham is recognized as the man who brought the site to world attention, although many others helped to bring this site into the public eye. The switchback-filled road that carries tourist buses to the site from the Urubamba River is called the Hiram Bingham Highway.

Bingham has been cited as one possible basis for the ‘Indiana Jones’ character. His book Lost City of the Incas became a bestseller upon its publication in 1948.

Peru has long sought the return of the estimated 40,000 artifacts, including mummies, ceramics and bones, Bingham had removed from the Machu Picchu site. On 14 September 2007, an agreement was made between Yale University and the Peruvian government for the return of the objects. though on April 12, 2008 the Peruvian government stated that they had revised previous estimates of 4,000 pieces up to 40,000.

Gerhard Bersu (1889 – 1964) was a German archaeologist who excavated widely across Europe.

He was born in Jauer in Silesia and as a teenager joined excavations near Potsdam. In successive years Bersu dug in several European countries and during the First World War he worked for the Office for the Protection of Monuments and Collections on the Western Front. After the war he was attached to the German Armistice and Peace delegations.

In 1924 he began working with the German Archaeological Institute in Frankfurt-am-Main, becoming its director in 1931 and contributed to it becoming one of the world’s leading archaeological organizations. In 1935 however he was forced out of his post by the Nazis and fled to Britain with his wife, Maria.

At the invitation of the Prehistoric Society he conducted excavations at Little Woodbury in Wiltshire, introducing novel continental methods, in 1938 and 1939. When war broke out, Bersu as a German national was interned on the Isle of Man. He was permitted to continue his work however and carried out several excavations on the island with the help of other internees.

When the war ended Bersu was offered the Chair of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin and remained there until 1947 when he returned to Germany. Taking up his former post at the Institute he continued his work until retiring in 1956.

Source: Wikipedia

Giovanni Battista Belzoni; sometimes known as The Great Belzoni (November 15, 1778 – December 3, 1823) was a prolific Venetian explorer of Egyptian antiquities.
Belzoni was born in Padua as the son of a barber. His family was from Rome and when Belzoni was 16 he went to work there, claiming that he ’studied hydraulics’. He intended taking monastic vows, but in 1798 the occupation of the city by French troops drove him from Rome and changed his proposed career. In 1800 he moved to the Netherlands.

In 1812 he left England and after a tour of performances in Spain, Portugal and Sicily, he went to Malta in 1815 where he met Ismael Gibraltar, an emissary of Muhammad Ali, who at the time was undertaking a programme of agrarian land reclamation and important irrigation works.

Belzoni wanted to show Muhammad Ali a hydraulic machine of his own invention for raising the waters of the Nile. Though the experiment with this engine was successful, the project was not approved by the pasha. Belzoni, now without a job, was resolved to continue his travels. On the recommendation of the orientalist, J. L. Burckhardt, he was sent by Henry Salt, the British consul to Egypt, to the Ramesseum at Thebes, from where he removed with great skill the colossal bust of Ramesses II, commonly called “the Young Memnon".

Shipped by Belzoni to England, this piece is still on prominent display at the British Museum. This weighed over 7 tons. It took him 17 days and 130 men to tow it to the river. He used levers to lift it onto rollers. Then he had his men distributed equally with 4 ropes drag it on the rollers. On the first day (July 27 he only covered a few yards, the second he covered 50 yards deliberately breaking the bases of 2 columns to clear the way for his burden. After 150 yards it sunk in the sand and a detour of 300 yards on firmer ground was necessary. From there it got a little easier and on August 12 he finally made it to the river where he was able to load it on a boat for shipment to the British Museum in London.

He also expanded his investigations to the great temple of Edfu, visited Elephantine and Philae, cleared the great temple at Abu Simbel of sand (1817), made excavations at Karnak, and opened up the sepulchre of Seti I (still sometimes known as “Belzoni’s Tomb"). He was the first to penetrate into the second pyramid of Giza, and the first European in modern times to visit the oasis of Bahariya. He also identified the ruins of Berenice on the Red Sea.

Source: Wikipedia

Ofer Bar-Yosef (born 1937) is an Israeli archaeologist whose main field of study has been the Palaeolithic period.

He was Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the institution where he originally studied archaeology at undergraduate and post-graduate levels in the 1960s. In 1988, he moved to the United States of America where he became Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Harvard University as well as Curator of Palaeolithic Archaeology at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

He has excavated widely on prehistoric Levantine sites including Kebara Cave, the early Neolithic village of Netiv HaGdud, as well as on Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites in China and the Republic of Georgia

Source: Wikipedia.org

Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli (February 19, 1900 – January 17, 1975) was one of the most influential Italian archaeologists and art historians of the 20th century.

A Marxist, Bianchi Bandinelli was descended from ancient aristocracy in Siena. His early research focused on the Etruscan centers close to his family lands, Clusium (1925) and Suana (1929). Disgusted with Italian fascism, despite being the man who showed Hitler around Rome under Mussolini, he converted to extreme communism after World War II.

As an anti-fascist, he was appointed to a number of important art-historical positions immediately after the war. He was director of the new government’s fine arts and antiquities ministry (Antichità e Belle Arti, 1945-48). From his chairs at the universities of Florence and Rome, he directed the new breed of Italian archaeologists sensitive to classical history based upon dialectical materialism.

He also taught at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In the 1950s and 1960s he undertook the writing of comprehensive texts on classical art intended to reach a wide and literate audience. He founded the Enciclopedia dell’arte antica in 1958. In the mid 1960s, Bianchi Bandinelli was commissioned to write the two volumes on Roman art for the French Arts of Mankind series. These works brought his writing to a larger audience and helped usher in social criteria for art into a larger and English-speaking audience. In 1967 he founded the Dialoghi di archeologia with his students, one of the most innovative, if controversial, periodicals on classical archaeology.

His interpretation of art was frequently maverick and, if not always compelling, forcefully grounded. One such case is his interpretation of the famous Belvedere Apollo, a Roman copy of a Greek work now thought to date to the second century. Although hailed by most art historians as a copy of the original Leochares, Bianchi Bandinelli characterized the piece as a frigid copy of a Hellenistic work without relation to Leochares.

One of his interests was the interrelation between Hellenistic, Etruscan and Roman art. His students included Giovanni Becatti, Antonio Giuliano, Mario Torelli, Andrea Carandini and Filippo Coarelli. His memoir of fascism in Italy was published in 1995 (Hitler e Mussolini, 1938: il viaggio del Führer in Italia)