The Gold Found Beneath a Bulgarian Cannery

In October 1972, an excavator operator named Raycho Marinov was digging the foundation of a cannery on the western outskirts of Varna, Bulgaria, when his machine struck something. He stopped, collected the objects from the trench, and brought them to the local museum.

What he had uncovered was the edge of a cemetery that had not been disturbed since the fifth millennium BC.

Professional excavations began shortly after Marinov's discovery and continued for years. Archaeologists eventually uncovered 294 graves, radiocarbon dated in 2006 to approximately 4,569–4,340 BC, placing them in the Chalcolithic period, sometimes called the Copper Age.

This was a transitional era in European prehistory when early metalworking was just beginning to develop, and large organized cemeteries were not previously known to hold gold of this scale or quality.