Necklace is oldest gold artifact in the Americas

Arizona archaeologists have discovered the oldest gold artifact in the Americas, a 4,000-year-old necklace that was produced about the same time a South American hunter- gatherer culture was first settling into villages.

The necklace predates the oldest previously known American artifact by 600 years, but is still 2,000 to 3,000 years younger than gold artifacts found in Africa, said archaeologist Mark Aldenderfer of the University of Arizona.

Aldenderfer and his colleagues, who reported their find Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found the necklace in the tiny Peruvian village of Jiskairumoko in the Lake Titicaca basin.

The village, which was inhabited from 3300 BC to 1500 BC, is marked by five pit houses -- the first such dwellings discovered in the Andes.

The houses were circular, 10 to 12 feet in diameter, and each probably held three to five people.

The houses had storage bins -- “although we don’t know what was in them” -- suggesting that they were occupied for long stretches of the year, Aldenderfer said.

The people were growing tubers that were ancestor of potatoes, as well as quinoa, an Andean grain. “They were a hunting, gathering people that were in the middle of the process of becoming sedentary people,” he said.

The necklace was apparently fashioned by taking gold nuggets from a nearby mine and pounding them flat with a mortar and pestle, although no tools were found. The flattened sheets were then rolled around a tube, perhaps a twig. Nine such beads were strung on a necklace and interspersed with small stones that were turquoise in color.

Another stone was apparently attached to one bead via a hole drilled into the bead.

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thomas.maugh@latimes.com