[Aztlan] OLDEST GOLD JEWELRY EVER FOUND IN THE AMERICAS FOUND IN PERU

[Benjamin Carter]

All,

The dates look good. The charcoal is from directly beneath the mandible 
associated around which the beads were found. The dates are:  
"3733 +/- 14C yrs B.P. (AA-36815) or 2155 to 1936 cal yrs B.C."

I have to agree with Hoopes comments on the National Geographic page. 
This is a really spectacular find, but associating this kind of gold 
working with social hierarchy is tentative at best. As discussed in the 
PNAS article, the technology is rather simple. People simply used pure 
gold (probably placer gold) and hammered it flat and then hammered it 
around a solid tube (a nice round stick would probably do). Let me be 
clear, I think this is an fascinating and important find, but more 
because it is associated with hunters and gatherers (Aldenderfer et al. 
use the term low-level food-producer, which is fairly cryptic) than as 
evidence of social hierarchy or status. In other words, this seems to be 
evidence of the ingenuity of hunters and gatherers experimenting with 
and utilizing resources from the environment in which they live. It is 
good evidence of the dynamic nature of hunters and gatherers, which 
contradicts the view that hunters and gatherers were not technologically 
innovative. Similarly, simply because an individual is buried with such 
artifacts does not necessarily indicate that they were of high status. 
This could be an indicator of differentiation rather than hierarchy. 
Perhaps there are other indications of high status with this individual 
that were not published.

The PNAS article does not have a lot of detail and the authors probably 
did not have the space to elaborate, so I look forward to further 
publications on this.

Ben Carter

Hoopes, John W wrote:
> Here's a link to the story in National Geographic News (with a comment
> from yours truly):
>
> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/03/080331-oldest-gold.html
>
> John Hoopes
>
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