Strange Metal From Beyond Our Planet Spotted in Ancient Treasure Stash
Among the glittering gold treasures from the Iberian Bronze Age, a pair of worn objects may be the most valuable.
Researchers found a dull bracelet and a forged rusted hollow hemisphere decorated with gold; researchers found that it was made not from metal underground but from iron from meteors falling from the sky.
The discovery was revealed in a study conducted by Salvador Rovira-Llorens, now retired chief conservation officer of the National Archaeological Museum in Spain. paper It emerged in 2024 and suggests that metalworking technology and techniques in Iberia more than 3000 years ago were much more advanced than we thought.
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Villena Treasure as cache 66 mostly gold objects As is known, it was discovered in the Alicante region of Spain in 1963, more than 60 years ago, and has since been considered one of the most important examples of Bronze Age jewelery in the Iberian Peninsula and all of Europe.
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Determining the age of the collection proved somewhat difficult due to two objects: a small, hollow hemisphere thought to be part of a staff or sword hilt; and a single, torque-like bracelet.
Both have an appearance that archaeologists describe as “ferrous”; So they look like they’re made of iron.
In the Iberian Peninsula, the Iron Age did not begin until around 850 BC, when smelted terrestrial iron began to replace bronze.
The problem is that the gold materials date to between 1500 and 1200 BC. Therefore, figuring out where the iron-looking artifacts were located in the context of the Villena Treasure was something of a puzzle.
However, iron ore in the earth’s crust is not the only source of malleable iron. There are numerous pre-Iron Age iron artifacts forged from meteorites around the world.
Perhaps the most famous Meteorite iron dagger of Pharaoh Tutankhamunbut there is other Bronze Age weapons made of material and they were very valuable.
There’s a way to tell the difference: Iron from meteorites has a much higher nickel content than iron extracted from Earth’s soil.
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So the researchers received permission from the Villena Municipal Archaeological Museum, which houses the collection, to carefully test the two artifacts and determine how much nickel they contained.
They carefully took samples of both artifacts and subjected the material to mass spectrometry to determine their composition.
Despite the high degree of corrosion that altered the artifact’s basic structure, the results strongly suggest that both the hemisphere and the bracelet are made of meteorite iron.
This neatly resolves the dilemma of how the two works fit in with the rest of the collection: They were made around the same time, B.C. It dates back to around 1400 to 1200.
“Available data indicate that the headdress and bracelet from the Villena Hoard would be the first two pieces currently attributable to meteorite iron in the Iberian Peninsula.” researchers explain in their article“consistent with the Late Bronze chronology before the beginning of widespread production of terrestrial iron.”
The results are inconclusive because the objects were so badly eroded. But the team suggests there are newer, non-invasive techniques that can be applied to the objects to obtain a more detailed data set that will help solidify the findings.
The findings were published at: Prehistoric Trabajos.
An earlier version of this article was published in February 2024.
