What’d you do on your summer vacation?

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Teens found 425 gold coins while volunteering at an excavation site in Israel.

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Teenagers dug up 1,000-year-old buried treasure while volunteering at an excavation site in Israel on Aug. 18, according to a Monday report from Reuters. Oz Cohen, one of the volunteers who found the treasure, said he originally thought the hundreds of 24-karat gold coins that were concealed in a clay jar were leaves.

“The person who buried this treasure 1,100 years ago must have expected to retrieve it and even secured the vessel with a nail so that it would not move,” the site’s excavation director Liat Nadav-Ziv told Reuters. “We can only guess what prevented him from returning to collect this treasure.”

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One of the volunteers initially thought the coins were leaves.

Heidi Levine/Getty Images
The treasure dates back to the ninth century Abbasid Caliphate period, experts told Reuters, and the bounty would’ve made the owner quite wealthy.

The coins were found in an area in central Israel reportedly planned for neighborhood development.