After a long standoff with the government of Peru, Yale University has agreed to return a large group of artifacts that were excavated at Machu Picchu in a historic dig by a Yale explorer in 1912 and that Peru contends were merely on loan and should have been returned long ago.


On Friday night Yale officials and a Peruvian delegation that traveled to New Haven signed a preliminary agreement that would return title to Peru of more than 350 artifacts -- ceramics and metal and stone objects -- that are considered to be of museum quality and several thousand fragments, bones and other objects considered to be primarily of interest to researchers.


Some of the research-quality artifacts will remain at Yale, while others will be returned, though legal title to all the items will be held by Peru. Yale will also contribute what one university official called a ''significant'' amount of money to establish a program of scholarly exchanges that will continue for at least three years.

''We aim to create a new model for resolving competing interests in cultural property,'' Yale's president, Richard C. Levin, said yesterday about the agreement. ''This can best be achieved by building a collaborative relationship -- one which involves scholars and researchers from Yale and Peru -- that serves science and human understanding.''

Peruvian officials have acknowledged that many of the objects themselves do not have great aesthetic or museum value. But their claim to them came at a time when Italy, Greece and several other countries had begun to wage impassioned public campaigns for repatriation of objects viewed as cultural patrimony that led to the return of pieces by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

In a joint statement Yale and the Peruvian government called the deal ''a new model of international cooperation providing for the collaborative stewardship of cultural and natural treasures.''

In comments broadcast on Peruvian radio, Hern?Garrido-Lecca, who led negotiations for Peru as housing and construction minister, said, ''After 14 hours of negotiations we arrived at a happy agreement in which Peru was established as the owner of every one of the pieces.''

The agreement came after several months of negotiations. Talks that had broken down resumed after Mr. Toledo's term ended and Peru elected a new president, Alan Garc?


Though the Machu Picchu objects were not looted, the dispute between Yale and Peru seemed fueled at least in part by the Toledo government decision to make the country's Inca heritage a central theme of its administration.