WASHINGTON -- Peru plans to sue prestigious Yale University in the United States, to recover storied Inca archaeological treasures which Lima says the school refuses to part with.

Labor Minister Jorge Villasante on Sunday confirmed the plans to pursue legal action. He is on a government panel leading the charge, along with Education Minister Jose Antonio Chang and Foreign Minister Jose Garcia Belaunde.

Built in the 1500s atop a 2,440-meter (7,800-foot) mountain in the Peruvian Andes by Inca emperor Pachacutec, Machu Picchu served as a ceremonial center and astronomical observatory until it was brought to the attention of the outside world in 1911.

Now Peru's top tourist attraction, the site was chosen last year as one of the new seven wonders of the world by an Internet vote in Lisbon organized by a Swiss foundation.

The treasures of Macchu Picchu are actually hundreds of archaeological pieces including pre-Columbian ceramics and textiles from the Inca citadel in Cusco. Yale has had the pieces for almost a century.

The pieces have been at Yale since 1911 after US archaeologist and explorer Hiram Bingham, who helped bring then-little-studied Macchu Picchu to the attention of Western academe, took them from Macchu Picchu promising to have them back within a year of his departure from Peru.

One disagreement between Lima and Yale is the exact number of pieces Bingham was authorized to leave Peru with at the time.

Lima is demanding the return of more than 46,332 documented pieces. Yale, in the northeastern US state of Connecticut, has proposed returning a much smaller number.