Archaeologists discover Americas' oldest gold necklace

US archaeologists claim to have found a 4000-year-old nine-bead necklace in a burial pit near Peru's Lake Titicaca, the oldest known gold object made in the Americas. The discovery of the golden necklace suggests that gold was being used as a status symbol in the Americas much earlier than previously thought.

On a rainy day in the Peruvian Andes, Mark Aldenderfer of the University of Arizona and colleagues were examining a pit at Jiskairumoko in the Lake Titicaca basin when they found nine cylindrical gold beads interspersed with small green stones at the base of an adult skull.

Writing in this week’s journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), the archaeologists said the necklace is the continent's oldest, and radiocarbon dating puts its origin at about 4,000 years ago, when hunter-gatherers occupied the area.

"It's always interesting to find something sexy," Aldenderfer said. "What this says about people in the past is even more interesting."

The discovery of the necklace "reflects a lot more than just a lovely object," he added. "This is a major piece of how people lived their lives and how they competed for status in the past."

Researchers uncovered the site during an archaeological survey of the region in the mid-1990s and began excavating it in 1999. Aldenderfer and his team waited to go their findings public until this week to avoid attracting looters until the team finished its work.

The pit showed no signs of having been disturbed, and C14 analysis of a fragment of burned wood found below the mandible in the burial site dated the discovery from 2155 to 1936 B.C.

The discovered gold artifact, made with nine tube-shaped gold beads that varied in length from 11.5 to 29 millimeters and weight from 1.5 to 5.2 grams interspersed with 11 circular beads of a coarse green stone, suggested this could have been a necklace.

Spectrometry data suggest the gold was quartz-vein nuggets, and marks on the necklace suggest that gold nuggets had been flattened with a stone hammer and then carefully bent or hammered around a hard cylindrical object to create a tubular shape.

The 4000-year-old nine-bead necklace predates the previous oldest known gold artifacts by around 600-800 years. Those discoveries were made in the central Peru and the Andean highlands at sites dated to around 1500 to 1410 B.C.