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ANTHROPOLOGY
Four-thousand-year-old gold artifacts from the Lake Titicaca basin, southern Peru

Mark Aldenderfer^*,, Nathan M. Craig^,, Robert J. Speakman^¶, and Rachel Popelka-Filcoff^||

*Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0030; Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, 409 Carpenter Building, University Park, PA 16802; Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3210; ^¶Museum Conservation Institute, Smithsonian Institution, Museum Support Center, 4210 Silver Hill Road, Suitland, MD 20746-2863; and ^||Archaeometry Laboratory, Research Reactor Center, and Department of Chemistry, University of Missouri, 125 Chemistry, 601 South College Avenue, Columbia, MO 65211

Edited by Joyce Marcus, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, and approved February 11, 2008 (received for review November 19, 2007)

Abstract

Artifacts of cold-hammered native gold have been discovered in a secure and undisturbed Terminal Archaic burial context at Jiskairumoko, a multicomponent Late Archaic–Early Formative period site in the southwestern Lake Titicaca basin, Peru. The burial dates to 3776 to 3690 carbon-14 years before the present (2155 to 1936 calendar years B.C.), making this the earliest worked gold recovered to date not only from the Andes, but from the Americas as well. This discovery lends support to the hypothesis that the earliest metalworking in the Andes was experimentation with native gold. The presence of gold in a society of low-level food producers undergoing social and economic transformations coincident with the onset of sedentary life is an indicator of possible early social inequality and aggrandizing behavior and further shows that hereditary elites and a societal capacity to create significant agricultural surpluses are not requisite for the emergence of metalworking traditions.

archaeology | Archaic | metallurgy | Andes

Author contributions: M.A. designed research; M.A. and N.M.C. performed research; M.A., R.J.S., and R.P.-F. analyzed data; and M.A. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: aldender{at}u.arizona.edu

© 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA

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