Bingham went to the United States in his teens in order to undertake higher education, entering Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, from which he graduated in 1894.

Since Harvard at the time did not have a specialist in Latin American history, Edward Gaylord Bourne of Yale served as the examiner for Bingham's qualifying exams.

But in 1907, when Yale sought a replacement for Bourne, who had died an early death, it appointed Bingham as a lecturer in South American history.

[6] He did not correctly recognize Vilcabamba as the last capital, instead continuing onward and misidentifying Machu Picchu as the "Lost City of the Incas".

Decades later, Bingham's oversight was rectified by the Andean explorer Vince Lee, whose detailed researches proved that Vilcabamba was indeed the Incas' last capital.

On July 24, 1911, Melchor Arteaga led Bingham to Machu Picchu, which had been largely forgotten by everybody except the small number of people living in the immediately neighboring valley.

Modern archaeological research has since determined that the site was not a religious center but a royal estate to which Inca leaders and their entourage repaired during the Andean summer.

Bingham merged his reliance on prospecting by local huaqueros with the notion that science had a sovereign claim on all artifacts that might contribute to the accumulation of knowledge.

Peru has long sought the return of the estimated 40,000 artifacts, including mummies, ceramics, and bones, that Bingham excavated and exported from Machu Picchu.

[14] Soon after Bingham announced the existence of Machu Picchu, others came forward claiming to have seen the city first, such as British missionary Thomas Payne and German engineer named J. M. von Hassel.

[15] Recent discoveries have put forth a new claimant, a German named Augusto Berns [de] who bought land opposite the Machu Picchu mountain in the 1860s and tried to raise money from investors to plunder nearby Incan ruins.

[citation needed] In 1911, Bingham found the name Agustín Lizárraga and the date 1902 written in charcoal on one of the walls of the Temple of the Three Windows.

Initially disappointed, he documented in his journal: "Agustín Lizárraga is discoverer of Machu Picchu and lives at San Miguel Bridge just before passing".

Ocampo left detailed notes on the richly carved and finely dressed stone lintels, among other notable features of the mountaintop palace.

On December 16, 1924, Bingham was also elected as a Republican to serve in the United States Senate to fill a vacancy created by the suicide of Frank Bosworth Brandegee.

Bingham took his clerk off duty, and paid his salary to the lobbyist, thus allowing him to attend as a Senate staffer to closed meetings of the Finance Committee's deliberations on tariff legislation.

Subsequently, Bingham decided to label the subcommittee's inquiry a partisan witch hunt, provoking further Senate interest.