ROADS LESS TRAVELED

The Explorers Club in Conversation with Vince Lee
By Milbry C. Polk

Despite a lifetime designing buildings, Vince Lee is suspicious of the city. "Our urban culture trivializes the land and ignores Nature," he says, and wonders about civilizations that took the other road. Believing that architecture is a language that tells volumes about its creators, he has devoted much of the last 20 years to finding, piecing together and reading the ruins of ancient American cultures that revered the Earth. The Explorers Club recently caught up with him to discuss this work and his newly released book about the final stronghold of the Incas.

EC: You have had extensive careers in three areas, architecture, mountaineering and archaeological exploration in Peru. How did these interests develop?
LEE: From as early as I can remember, all I ever wanted to do was play out in the woods when the weather was good and stay home and build things with my blocks and Lincoln logs when it wasn't. I've never really lost that, and both my long career in architecture and 30 seasons of alpine guiding were the results. For me, exploration was an outgrowth of the mountaineering. Back in the 60s, after a tour teaching mountain warfare with the Marines, I worked for several Outward Bound schools and for Paul Petzolt, who'd just started NOLS. Eventually, I had my own guide service, first in Jackson Hole and later all over the world.
       Unlike many climbers in those days, I was more interested in getting out into wild, remote country than in doing hard new routes above the road. Then one morning, lying in my sleeping bag waiting for dawn up in the Wind River Range, I found myself going down the list of my many old climbing buddies and realized more than half of them were already dead! I was beginning to slow down a bit anyway and wondered if maybe it was time to get into something new -- still in the mountains, but a little less risky.
        My first trip to Peru in 1982 changed everything. I'd read about a mysterious, unclimbed, peak overlooking lost Inca ruins in the Amazon in explorer Gene Savoy's book, "Antisuyo," and with two friends decided to climb it. I had also just met Nancy Goodman, a Peace Corps veteran stationed in Peru during the 60s. She joined us in Cuzco after the climb, we were married the following year and she's been with me on every trip since.

EC: Prior to that first expedition to climb in Peru, had you been interested in the Inca?
LEE: Not really. I'd always had a fascination with Indians, but didn't know much about the Incas. Once I got to the Andes and saw the ruins, I was hooked. My interest in designing trophy houses for the rich was starting to fade, and the Inca rekindled my love of architecture. I read everything I could get my hands on about them and soon expanded my studies to Andean archaeology in general. The lure of that first trip was still strong, though, and in 1984 we went back and spent two months exploring and mapping the sites I'd only visited two years earlier. The area is called Vilcabamba, and was the final stronghold of the Incas after Pizarro took control of Cuzco. It is littered with ruins and we even found some new ones no one had ever reported.
        A mutual friend suggested I show my drawings to John Howland Rowe, the noted Andeanist at U.C. Berkeley, and to my amazement, he was very interested in what we were doing and encouraged us to keep at it. The following year I was elected a member and appointed a Research Associate of Rowe's Institute of Andean Studies. We've attended and I've given papers at its Annual Meeting every year since. Although I'm untrained in archaeology and have no academic standing, my work has been well accepted by the professionals. The adventurous accounts many of us explorers love to write aren't very useful to scientists, but they appreciate the solid documentation and analysis our expeditions always bring back and publish.

EC: What is the controversy about Vilcabamba?
LEE: Hiram Bingham went to Peru in 1911 looking for the Incas' final capital, a then-lost city called Vilcabamba The Old. He found it at a very remote place called Espíritu Pampa (The Plain of Ghosts), but ironically he found Machu Picchu by accident during the same expedition and mistakenly thought it was the site of the old Inca capital. Not until the 60s did Gene Savoy revisit Espíritu Pampa and dispute Bingham's identification. Savoy was right, but his evidence was inconclusive and led to claims by others that he and Bingham were both wrong and the lost city was still lost. John Hemming's scholarship in the 70s and our field work in the 80s settled the issue in favor of Savoy, but there are still a few diehards promoting bogus alternative theories.

EC: What has been the result of your surveys of Vilcabamba?
LEE: My book, "Forgotten Vilcabamba, Final Stronghold of the Incas," describes our first three expeditions and summarizes the bloody history of Inca Vilcabamba and the early explorations of Bingham, Savoy and others. A lengthy Appendix goes on to catalog everything we know about the province, after eleven seasons in the field. Journals full of notes, maps and sketches are condensed into 60 pages of maps, plans and drawings and 48 color plates represent the thousands of slides we've taken over the years. Altogether, it's by far the most complete source on Inca Vilcabamba in print. About 1000 copies have been sold, and partly as a result, there's more and more interest in the region.
        The Peruvian government has declared Vilcabamba a National Park and is beginning to protect the ruins. I've also tried to interest my professional colleagues in doing serious work there, but without much success. It is an entire Inca province largely undisturbed after 400 years, and although it's easier to get to now than ever before, it is still a bit remote and accommodations are "rustic." Together with some friends, Nancy and I helped the locals build a small, but comfortable hotel at the roadhead, so there's now a convenient place to stay on your way in and out of the area.

EC: Do you give any credence to the "great ruins" in the jungle at the head of the Río Montaro that Julien Tennant wrote about in the 1950s?
LEE: Well, you never know. The Montaro is still desperate, unexplored country and other than the local Machiguenga Indians and readers of my book, almost no one knows the story. Checking it out would be a serious, but interesting expedition, that's for sure. Tennant's evidence was so skimpy, though, I don't think it's worth a season of my life right now.

EC: What is happening in the Vilcabamba region today?
LEE: It is a trekker's paradise, and the new National Park is intended to take some of the strain off Machu Picchu and the Inca Trail, both of which are increasingly overcrowded. The larger sites are being cleared and stablized and the locals are informally clearing some of the smaller ruins.
        This isn't necessarily good news. Without stabilization, ruins held together for centuries by living vegetation tend to fall apart once the growth is cut. Buildings standing full height when I first mapped them have since collapsed. Still, the only source of funding for preservation is eco-tourism, so visitors are better than the alternative, which is mineral development. Ever since before the Incas, the region has been valued as a mining district. Old mines are common at higher elevations, and ore can still be found lying around the tailings piles. It's a difficult and expensive place to mine, of course, with modern equipment, but if the prices of gold and silver ever go back up to 1980s levels, look out!

EC: Are there still places to find in the Andes?
LEE: Yes, definitely. Just this year, in fact, there were two interesting discoveries not far from the area described in my book. Both were by buddies of mine. The first, reported by Peter Frost, an expatriate Englishman in Cuzco and author of the best guidebook to the city, was supported by the National Geographic Society. Their site crowns a ridge called Cerro Victoria, overlooking the spectacular canyon of the Apurimac River. Work is ongoing, but it seems related to a cluster of nearby, but long-abandoned Inca silver and copper mines. The other was found by Club member and Colorado rancher, Gary Ziegler, and Hugh Thomson, another Englishman with connections to the Royal Geographical Society in London. Named Cotacoca, their site is not far from Cerro Victoria as the condor flies, but nearly a mile lower down the mountain in a canyon tributary to the Apurimac. Both may have been satellites of the major Inca ruins at Choquequirao, visited by Bingham in 1909, two years before he found Machu Picchu.
        Both Cerro Victoria and Cotacoca were described in the press as "Lost cities and probable last refuges of the Vilcabamba Incas." Ironically, we have no idea what either site was or how, if at all, they fit into the history of Vilcabamba. They may even have been abandoned during the post-Conquest period. We just don't know. Neither site is mentioned any-where in the Spanish chronicles of Vilcabamba, nor is Choquequirao for that matter. All three sites are located in what we nowadays think of as Vilcabamba, but the exact boundaries of the province in Inca times are unknown and subject to considerable debate. We do know that the "ceja de selva," or "eyebrow of the jungle," as the eastern slope of the Andes is called, was densely populated prior to the Conquest. So, to return to your question, there are probably lots of sites still lying undiscovered in the cloud forests of the Andean "montaña."

EC: What do you consider your major obstacle now?
LEE: All of us amateur explorers have the same problems. Exploration costs money, and publicity is one way to generate or recoup it and at the same time get your work out there for people to see. Unfortunately, it is only newsworthy if you find something, even though the absence of ruins may be equally significant. Likewise, nobody wants to read that you've found something, but have no idea what it is or means. So press reports tend to be short on facts and long on speculation, sometimes ridiculously so, and devoid of substance as well, as in the case of a Spaniard named del Valle. Several years ago, he was widely credited in the European press with the discovery of a major Inca city spreading over "four miles" through the forests of the lower Río Apurimac. He has since nominated himself, unsuccessfully, for a Rolex Award and applied for a quarter million Euro grant to clear and develop the site. An archaeologist with a Discovery Channel film crew sent in to verify and record del Valle's claims was shown nothing but several small, tumbled structures only one of which was clearly Inca. The Peruvians called it the Don Quijote expedition. Hoaxes will always be with us, but serious explorers need a platform for the accurate and unsensationalized reporting of their work, whether or not it would sell newspapers or captivate TV viewers.

EC: What are you doing now?
LEE: I'm spread pretty thin. I publish a line of monographs on all sorts of Andean subjects dscribed on my web page. Nancy and I have taken part in two NOVA television specials dealing with pre-industrial technology and we're just getting acquainted with the Anasazi archaeological community near our new Four Corners place in McElmo Canyon, Colorado. My son, Chris, now runs the architectural office in Jackson Hole, but I still dabble a bit in design now and then.

EC: What does the future hold for you?
LEE: After Nancy, exploration is still my first love, and we're not done with Vilcabamba quite yet. Like everyone else working there, we're always on the lookout for another Machu Picchu, and despite his bogus claims, del Valle may be onto something. We've been searching the same area for four years, now, and have turned up lots of small sites, but nothing important. Still, on a satellite image, it's at the center of a big hole in the otherwise uniform pattern of Inca occupation of the region, and two major Inca roads disappear into the forest there. As Gene Savoy told me twenty years ago, all those roads lead to something.

Article reprinted by permission of The Explorers Journal