Archaeologists Find 4,000-Year-Old Gold Necklace in South Peru

Archaeologists discovered a 4,000-year-old necklace in a burial pit near Peru's Lake Titicaca, the oldest gold artifact ever found in the Americas, according to a study published today.

The nine gold beads were dated to between 2155 B.C. and 1936 B.C., about 600 years older than previous finds, according to the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The necklace, made from tube-like beads of gold and stones, was found with skull and neck fragments from an elderly person and a child in Jiskairumoko, a settlement of hunter-gatherers, wrote lead author Mark Aldenderfer, an anthropologist with the University of Arizona, Tucson.