The Oldest Gold of Americas: 4,100 Years Old

Now, you can find out how old the American obsession for gold is. A new research published in the "Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences" reveals it: a 4,100-year-old nine-bead Peruvian necklace represents the oldest known gold artifact in the Americas. The artifact was discovered in a burial pit near Lake Titicaca, associated with an adult jawbone.

The previously oldest known gold artifacts in Americas came also from the Peruvian Andes and were 3,500 to 3,410-year-old. This oldest gold was dug close to the ancient settlement of Jiskairumoko, 5,300 years old.

"The beads were hammered from gold nuggets and suggest the development of an early sedentary culture. What this discovery is really telling us is that the people who were living at this site were undergoing a rather profound social and economic transition towards sedentary life. Once that process starts, a lot of the social rules of life when you're a hunter-gatherer change dramatically such that different kinds of institutions are beginning to be created," said lead author Mark Aldenderfer, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona.

The site was discovered during in the mid-1990s and the digging started in 1999.

"As we began to excavate, [the site] in fact did have a lot of very cool information-houses that were never discovered in the Andes before and a variety of other kinds of features," said Aldenderfer.

The discovery of the gold artifact was a total surprise. Its age was determined based on a fragment of wood charcoal. The jawbone could belong to a woman, as all the other burials discovered in the same location from this time frame belonged to women.

"We're fairly certain this necklace was used as a real mark of high status for this individual. That doesn't mean they were an important political leader, but it does mean that the individual had a certain level of prestige and connections to the world to be able to obtain this necklace," said Aldenderfer.

Others don't see things this way.
"The main implication of this discovery is that gold was being used for ornamentation before the appearance of complex social organization. The people of Jiskairumoko apparently valued gold because it was a pretty, noncorroding, malleable material," said John Hoopes, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas.