A Roman-era child’s grave in Bulgaria held gold earrings and a coin of Emperor Aurelian

A child buried in a Roman cemetery in Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, was laid to rest with two gold earrings and a coin of Emperor Aurelian struck in AD 274 or 275. The grave is one of 135 in a necropolis that sits beyond the southwestern walls of the ancient city of Augusta Traiana, beneath the modern town. The Regional History Museum of Stara Zagora, which ran the excavation, has not given the child’s age, and the burial’s date comes from the coin rather than from the remains.

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A rescue dig on a building plot

The cemetery came to light during rescue excavations on land set aside for a new residential building and garages, the kind of fieldwork that happens when construction is about to cover an archaeological site. The cemetery was in use from the late second century to the fifth century AD, which means its graves span roughly three centuries of Roman and late Roman life in the city. Only four of the 135 graves held cremated remains; the rest were burials of bodies, so cremation was the rare exception across the whole span.

Construction varied from grave to grave. Some were covered with Roman roof tiles, bricks or stone slabs, while others were simple pits with no cover at all. The Regional History Museum of Stara Zagora’s website carried a news item on Oct. 14 about new finds from rescue excavations on a plot earmarked for a residential building, which matches the site the museum’s find was reported from two days later.

Two gold earrings and a coin of Aurelian

According to the Arkeonews report of Oct. 16, the child had been buried with the head pointing west and the feet toward the east, and the grave goods were two gold earrings and an antoninianus, the silver-washed coin that circulated widely in the third century. The coin was minted at Serdica, the modern Bulgarian capital Sofia, in AD 274 to 275. The report calls the coin an important chronological clue, since a coin cannot have been buried before the year it was struck, and Arkeonews puts the grave at roughly 1,750 years old in its headline.

The emperor on the coin ruled from 270 to 275, according to Wikipedia’s entry on Aurelian, and was killed in late 275 at Caenophrurium in Thrace while preparing a campaign against the Sassanids. The same entry says he introduced antoniniani containing 5 percent silver, marked XXI or KA, and that Serdica was the capital of the new province of Dacia Aureliana that he organized south of the Danube. A child’s burial that falls inside those final two years of his reign was therefore laid down in the final two years of his reign, a period historians group under the Crisis of the Third Century.

Popular Science’s version of the story says the grave was flagged during a site survey for a new apartment complex and parking garage, and counts about 135 graves used for nearly three centuries outside the original walls of Augusta Traiana. Neither account gives excavation dates, and the Arkeonews report names no individual archaeologists, so the find is attributed here to the Regional History Museum of Stara Zagora as an institution rather than to any named researcher.

The limits of a single coin and a pair of earrings

The presence of gold jewelry, in the report’s words, suggests that valuable personal possessions accompanied the burial. The account is careful about how far that goes: it says the jewelry is not enough to establish the family’s social standing. The child’s identity and circumstances of death remain unknown, and no archaeologist is quoted in either the Arkeonews piece or the Popular Science account.

Both reports raise the same possibility about the coin, that it was left as payment to Charon, the ferryman of the dead in Greek and Roman belief. Popular Science describes the earrings as stunningly preserved and presents the Charon idea as a possibility rather than a conclusion, and Arkeonews says the coin’s purpose in this particular burial is unknown. Coins were sometimes placed with the deceased for exactly that reason, but a single coin in a single grave does not settle the question for a child buried near the end of the third century.

Augusta Traiana and its coinage

Augusta Traiana developed under the emperor Trajan in the early second century AD and was traditionally ranked second in prominence in Thrace to Philippopolis, modern Plovdiv. It gained the right to issue its own bronze coinage under Marcus Aurelius, and a catalogue entry on Numista shows what that looked like: a bronze piece of about 18 millimeters struck at Augusta Traiana in Thrace between 161 and 180, with a serpent coiled on an altar on the reverse. The coin in the child’s grave is a different type from a different mint, a reminder that the people of the city used money minted far away.

The museum has not yet released the details that would make the child’s burial easier to read, such as the child’s age or the position of the earrings.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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