Because it was dug up illegally rather than under archaeological control, the disc's find-context had to be reconstructed after the event, which is the root of the dating controversy. The excavation team dated the bronzes found with it, swords, axes, chisels and bracelets, to the Early Bronze Age Unetice culture, around 1600 BC. The looters were tried and the disc secured for the Halle museum, which has made it a centrepiece and the emblem of a UNESCO Memory of the World listing.
The looting and recovery of the disc reads almost like a case study in the antiquities trade: found illegally by metal detectorists in 1999, it passed through at least two sets of dealers and was nearly sold into a private collection in Basel before German police, working with the Halle museum's archaeologists, arranged a sting operation in a Basel hotel in 2002 that recovered the disc along with the associated bronze weapons and ornaments from the original hoard. The looters and a dealer were subsequently convicted, and the recovered objects, disc, two swords, two axes, a chisel and fragments of bracelets, were reunited and treated as a single archaeological assemblage despite the gap between discovery and controlled study, the very gap that later fuelled the 2020 dating challenge. UNESCO's 2013 inscription of the disc in the Memory of the World register recognised it specifically as significant documentary heritage rather than only as an art object, a designation that reflects the disc's status as, on the prevailing dating, the earliest known depiction of astronomical phenomena rendered as a durable physical object anywhere in the world, a status the register listing itself helped cement in wider public recognition beyond specialist archaeology.