Sometime after Romania's Communist government fell, looters began digging into Sarmizegetusa Regia, the mountain fortress of the ancient Dacian kings, and pulling gold spiral bracelets shaped like coiled snakes out of the ground. Within a few years those bracelets started surfacing far from Transylvania, in European auction houses and on museum shelves, sold by dealers who asked few questions about where Bronze Age gold with no export papers had come from. The film follows archaeologists and investigators piecing together the smuggling routes the bracelets traveled and the black market that priced them, while Romanian officials push to get the pieces back and prosecute the network that stripped the site. Interviews with the archaeologists working the looted trenches at Sarmizegetusa Regia sit alongside the legal case built to recover the missing pieces. The bracelets themselves, heavy coils of nearly pure gold worn by a vanished Dacian elite, are the physical evidence at the center of a case about who owns a country's buried history once it leaves the ground.