10 Real-Life Archaeologists More Badass Than Indiana Jones

3. The Man Who Found Machu Picchu

There's not many people who can say to have discovered an entire lost civilisation. Indiana Jones did it in Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, although most audiences wish he hadn't have bothered. Hiram Bingham III, meanwhile, made public the existence of the Quechua citadel of Machu Picchu, Peru in 1911. With the help of local farmers, admittedly. But Alfred Molina played his part in Raiders... Despite lacking any formal training as an archaeologist, Bingham lectured on it widely, and it was a research trip during his time at Yale that yielded the discovery of Machu Picchu. He set out to find any number of other unexplored Inca cities, and discovered a huge haul of artefacts as he did. Artefacts which Peru is now, quite rightly, petitioning to have returned to them. But boy, does his collection rival that of Dr Jones and then some: the Machu Picchu site alone was where he found an estimated 40,000 artefacts, including mummies, ceramics and bones. Not bad. And unlike Indiana Jones, he wasn't bad at flying €“ in fact, he commanded the Air Service's largest training school for a spell.