Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• A wind turbine project in Germany’s Lower Saxony revealed a Bronze Age jewelry hoard that may have had religious significance.
• Construction workers discovered a mix of bronze and amber after the excavator’s very first scoop of soil.
• Earlier archaeological digs at the same site had already discovered Neolithic settlements and remains from classical antiquity.

After the professional archaeologists cleared out of the way, allowing construction to proceed on a 23-acre, 19-turbine wind-power farm in Germany, the very first scoop of the contractor’s excavator brought the archaeologists right back. The churned-up dirt included bronze and amber, but not just any old kind. It was the largest Bronze Age amber hoard ever discovered in Lower Saxony.

Prior to the start of construction on the wind-power project near Ahlum and Dettum, the Lower Saxony State Office for Heritage Preservation commissioned an archaeological survey of the area that yielded finds ranging in age from the Neolithic period to late antiquity (roughly 5000 B.C.E. to 400 C.E.). The finds were very diverse, including everything from prehistoric settlements to a pit of buried dogs. But it was the excavator’s initial foray into the Harz foothills that uncovered the most impressive find: a jewelry hoard featuring decorated collars, arm spirals, and bronze pins. One necklace featured 156 amber beads.

The newly discovered jewelry has been dated to between 1500 and 1300 B.C.E., according to a translated statement from the Office for Heritage Preservation, making it the first find from that period in the region since 1967. Experts with the preservation office believe the jewelry belonged to at least three different high-status women, and the different pieces may have been buried together as part of a religious offering.

Once the first bronze and amber had been carefully plucked from the bucket of the excavator, archaeologists returned to the site and lifted the rest of the jewelry hoard up out of the ground in a single block, with the intact soil surrounding the remaining pieces. The items were then brought to a laboratory where they’re undergoing further analysis. The experts call it “quite possibly the most significant assemblage of finds from the entire excavation.”

The team said that the neck rings, arm spirals, decorative bronze plates, and two disc brooches were fancy, sure, but not as striking as the necklace on which 156 amber beads were arrayed. During the Bronze Age, amber was traded among the elite from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and far beyond. Often collected along the Baltic coastlines and coveted for its look, jewelry made from imported amber was typically reserved—due to the extreme cost of acquiring it—for the most high-profile members of a community. One of the most expansive trading networks of the time has therefore been dubbed the Amber Road by modern archaeologists.

Of the 412 artifacts uncovered within the site, archaeologists discovered two well-preserved house foundations from the Linear Pottery culture of the sixth millennium B.C.E.—the first farming culture in the region.

At the other end of the site’s timeline, the archaeologists found multiple pits from antiquity holding the remains of everything from wheel-thrown pottery produced in the Roman style to metal objects. The excavation also revealed a “three-layer comb” from the fourth or fifth century C.E. that features circular ornamentation and bronze rivets. These combs were personal possessions that were often included in funerary offerings, but due to the common practice of cremation, they typically survive in modern archaeological finds as tiny fragments, rather than the full specimens found in Lower Saxony.

“The research and conservation of these highly delicate objects are just now getting underway,” the experts wrote, adding that “a series of advanced material analyses are planned.”