The gold from a lakeside cemetery near Varna, on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, says that some people 6,500 years ago were far richer than their neighbours. Radiocarbon dating puts the objects at that age, only a few centuries after the first farmers arrived in Europe. Yet the treasure turned up in just a handful of graves, which makes it the first evidence of social hierarchy anywhere in the record, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
What came out of the ground
Archaeologists dug about 13 pounds of gold from the site between 1972 and 1991. Around 11 pounds of it now sits in the Varna Museum of Archaeology, a former girls’ school. The haul includes pendants, bracelets, breastplates, beads, stylised bulls and a clay bowl painted with stripes of gold dust. By weight alone, the gold in that room is worth about $181,000.
The richest burial is grave 43. Its occupant, a man, lay on his back wearing gold bangles, gold bead necklaces and pierced gold discs that once hung from his clothes. He held a polished axe with a gold-wrapped handle, and a flint blade 16 inches long lay at his side. The Archaeological Institute of America’s magazine notes that he went into the ground with more than two pounds of gold, a sign of his standing above the rest.
“He has everything: armor, weapons, wealth,” Vladimir Slavchev, the museum’s curator of prehistoric archaeology, told Smithsonian.
The theory it overturned
Before Varna, most archaeologists pictured the Copper Age people around the mouth of the Danube living in small, loose groups. Marija Gimbutas went further in her 1974 book Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. Working from female figurines found in lower Danube settlements, she argued that women ran these societies and that they were peaceful and egalitarian. In her account, that world ended around 4000 BC when patriarchal invaders arrived from the east.
Gimbutas was finishing the book as the first Varna finds surfaced, and she could not have known what they would show. Slavchev is blunt about the result. The richest graves and the chiefs were male, he told Smithsonian, and the idea of a society run by women is “completely false”.
Why the Copper Age now looks different
Varna is part of a wider rethink. The centuries between 5000 and 3500 BC are now read as a transition, according to Archaeology magazine. Early Europeans began using metal tools in that period. They also built complex social structures and long trading networks. The magazine reports no evidence of social hierarchy in the Neolithic that came before.
Svend Hansen of the German Archaeological Institute told the magazine that Copper Age and Neolithic societies are routinely described as egalitarian. The recent digs suggest metalworking, and the changes it brought, may be what pulled people out of that older pattern.
The find itself began with a phone call in 1972. A former schoolteacher with a village museum had treasure, and would someone from Varna come and look? Alexander Minchev, then 25, recalls his older colleagues rolling their eyes, because such calls usually meant copper coins.
