Lima: Yale University is holding some 40,000 artifacts from the famed Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, a government official heading efforts to return the pieces told the state news agency Andina.

Peru's government and Yale University reached an agreement last September to return about 4,000 pieces - including mummies, ceramics and bones - that were taken a century ago from what has become one of the world s most famous archaeological sites.

Richard Burger, a professor of anthropology at Yale and former director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, said yesterday that the disparate numbers are a result of counting by different methods - whether by lot or by individual fragments.

"You can say that there is a skeleton or you can say that there are hundreds of bones," said Burger, who was in Peru. "One thing is for sure, there are not 40,000 objects of museum (quality), no," he said.

The tally of 40,000 artifacts appeared in a report presented by archaeologists from the National Culture Institute to the Peruvian government earlier this month after taking an inventory at Yale, Health Minister Hernan Garrido Lecca said. Institute director Cecilia Bakula declined to comment Monday on the statistics given by Lecca.

"It's a question of semantics, nothing more," Burger said. "There are different ways of counting." Peru demanded the return of the collection in 2006, saying it never relinquished ownership when Yale scholar Hiram Bingham III rediscovered Machu Picchu in 1911. Yale responded with a proposal to split the collection. Negotiations broke down, and Peru threatened a lawsuit.
Source : PTI