Strange metal from outside our world found in ancient treasure trove: ScienceAlert
Amid a collection of glittering gold treasures from the Iberian Bronze Age, two corroded items may be the most precious of all.
Researchers have found that a dull bracelet and a rusted, hollow hemisphere decorated with gold were forged not from metal from the earth, but from iron from meteorites that fell from the sky.
The discovery, made by Salvador Rovira-Llorens, the now-retired head of the Monuments Department of Spain’s National Archaeological Museum, suggests that metalworking technology and techniques in Iberia more than 3,000 years ago were far more advanced than we thought.
The Treasure of Villena, as the cache of 66 objects made mostly of gold is called, was discovered more than 60 years ago, in 1963, in what is now Alicante, Spain, and has since been considered one of the most important examples of Bronze Age goldsmithing on the Iberian Peninsula and throughout Europe.
However, determining the age of the collection was somewhat difficult due to two objects: a small, hollow hemisphere believed to be part of a scepter or sword hilt; and a single, torus-like bracelet. Both have what archaeologists have described as a “ferruginous” appearance – that is, they appear to be made of iron.
In the Iberian Peninsula, the Iron Age, in which smelted terrestrial iron began to replace bronze, did not begin until around 850 BC. The problem is that the gold materials date back to between 1500 and 1200 BC. Be dated. Therefore, figuring out where the iron-bearing artifacts related to the Treasure of Villena are located was a mystery.
But iron ore from the Earth’s crust is not the only source of malleable iron. There are a number of pre-Iron Age iron artifacts found around the world that were forged from meteorite material. Perhaps the most famous is Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s meteoritic iron dagger, but there are other Bronze Age weapons made from this material that were very highly prized.
There’s one way to tell the difference: iron from meteorites has a much higher nickel content than iron dug out of the ground. Therefore, the researchers received permission from the Municipal Archaeological Museum of Villena, where the collection is housed, to carefully test the two artifacts and determine how much nickel they contained.
They carefully collected samples of both artifacts and subjected the material to mass spectrometry to determine their composition. Despite the high level of corrosion altering the elemental composition of the artifact, the results strongly suggest that both the hemisphere and the bracelet were made from meteoritic iron.
This resolves the dilemma of how the two artifacts fit with the rest of the collection: they were made around the same time and date back to around 1400 to 1200 BC. BC.
“Available data suggests that the cap and bracelet from the Villena treasure are currently the first two pieces attributed to meteoritic iron in the Iberian Peninsula,” the researchers write in their paper, “which is consistent with an earlier chronology from the Late Bronze Age.” to the beginning of widespread production of terrestrial iron.
Because the objects are now so severely corroded, the results are inconclusive. However, there are newer, non-invasive techniques that could be applied to the objects to obtain a more detailed data set that would help solidify the results, the team says.
The results were published in Trabajos de Prehistory.
