The Varna Necropolis

The account

A digger laying cable on the Bulgarian coast turned up grave goods older than the pyramids by two thousand years. The Varna graves hold the oldest gold humans ever shaped, thousands of pieces, a chieftain buried sheathed in it. Before writing, before the wheel, someone here had gold and the power it brings.

Leads, where the trail points now

• The oldest worked gold in the world, from graves dated around 4600 BC, found in 1972 by a backhoe operator cutting a trench near Varna, Bulgaria.
• The gold is in the museum; the discovery itself, by digger Raycho Marinov, is the fun of it.
• The lead is that the necropolis is not fully excavated and more gold-rich graves likely remain in the area.