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UA led team finds oldest known gold artifact in the Amricas Gold jewelry found in Peru called earliest for Americas

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A 4,000-year-old gold necklace discovered in the Peruvian Andes by a team led by an archaeologist from The University of Arizona, is thought to be the oldest gold artifacts found in the Americas.

The findings, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that even early groups with limited resources recognized the value of status symbols.

Mark Aldenderfer, a professor of anthropology at the UA, and his team excavated the site, Jiskairumoko, near Lake Titicaca located in a drainage basin. where groups of hunters and gatherers from the Archaic period who were beginning to make the transition to a more settled existence.

Dates for the Archaic period, when Jiskairumoko was inhabited by these people, are as early as 5,400 years ago and ending about 4,000 years ago.

The necklace, made of turquoise and native gold that had been hammered into shape and may have belonged to someone with an elevated rank in the community, was found in burial site excavated by Aldenderfer and the team.

Carbon-14 dates for Jiskairumoko range from 2155 to 1936 B.C., making the necklace about 4,000 years old, and some 600 years older than the previous earliest known gold artifacts in South America, or anywhere else in the Americas.