SOCIETY × TECHNOLOGY
Varna, the Oldest Gold Treasure
~4500 BCE
Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Northgrippian
The Varna I cemetery, on the Bulgarian shore of the Black Sea, holds the world's earliest large-scale assemblage of gold objects, buried with the dead of a Copper Age community. Colin Renfrew, writing when the excavation was first published, judged it the oldest substantial find of gold unearthed anywhere, and at least 1,500 years older than the treasure of Troy II. Radiocarbon has tightened the chronology twice since. Fourteen measurements gave roughly 4600 to 4450 BCE; a fuller set of 71 dates from 53 graves, corrected for a reservoir effect detected in some of the buried individuals, places activity between 4596 and 4341 BCE, a span of 120 to 260 years. Leusch and colleagues, examining the objects themselves, treat the craft as an invention rather than an import: fine gold working appears here abruptly and develops fast.
Why it matters
Renfrew drew the consequence for the society that produced it. A community that had looked moderately egalitarian turns out to show clear ranking, because the gold and the other high-status materials gather in a few graves instead of spreading through the cemetery. Higham and colleagues sharpen that with dates: the lavish graves amount to no more than a handful of paramount chiefs, buried across fifty or sixty years, which they read as a new social structure settling into place. Wealth that is shown rather than used leaves its record in who is buried holding it.
Dating & uncertainty
Three published brackets do not quite coincide, and the gap owes more to method than to disagreement. The first fourteen measurements gave about 4600 to 4450 BCE; the gold objects are referred to 4550 to 4450 BCE; the fullest model, 71 dates corrected for a reservoir effect, runs from 4596 to 4341 BCE at 95 per cent. The date kept here, about 4500 BCE, with a bracket of 6,600 to 6,400 years before present, sits inside all three. Should the fullest model prevail, the cemetery closes nearly a century later than the first series allowed, and its use stretches from about 150 years to as much as 260.
Sources
- Renfrew (1978), Antiquity · Varna and the social context of early metallurgydoi:10.1017/s0003598x00072197
- Higham et al. (2007), Antiquity · New perspectives on the Varna cemetery (Bulgaria): AMS dates and social implicationsdoi:10.1017/s0003598x00095636
- Leusch et al. (2015), Cambridge Archaeological Journal · On the Invention of Gold Metallurgy: The Gold Objects from the Varna I Cemetery (Bulgaria)doi:10.1017/s0959774314001140
- Higham et al. (2018), Radiocarbon · AMS Dating of the Late Copper Age Varna Cemetery, Bulgariadoi:10.1017/rdc.2018.9
Our species’ history as one day
23:30:1729 min 43 s before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day