Amidst a cache of glittering gold treasures from the Iberian Bronze Age, a pair of corroded objects may be the most precious of all.
A dull bracelet adorned with gold and a rusting hollow hemisphere is forged, researchers have found, not from underground metal, but iron from a meteorite that fell from the sky.
The discovery, led by Salvador Rovira-Lorenz, now retired head of conservation at Spain’s National Archaeological Museum, was revealed in a paper in 2024, and suggests that metalworking techniques and techniques in Iberia 3,000 years ago were more advanced than we thought.
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The Treasure of Villena, 66 often referred to as a cache of gold objects, was discovered more than 60 years ago in 1963 in what is now Alicante, Spain, and has since been considered the most important example of Bronze Age gold work in the Iberian Peninsula and all of Europe.
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Determining the age of the collection has been somewhat difficult, thanks to two objects: a small, hollow hemisphere, believed to be part of a scepter or sword hilt; and a single, torque-like bracelet.
Both have what archaeologists describe as a “ferrous” appearance—that is, they appear to be made of iron.
In the Iberian Peninsula, the Iron Age – where smelted terrestrial iron began to replace bronze – did not begin until around 850 BC.
The problem is that the gold materials are dated between 1500 and 1200 BC. So it has been something of a puzzle to work out where the iron-looking artefacts sit in the context of the Vilena hoard.
But iron ore from the Earth’s crust is not the only source of malleable iron. Around the world there are pre-Iron Age iron artifacts that were made from meteorite materials.
Perhaps the most famous is Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s meteorite iron dagger, but there are other Bronze Age weapons made of the material, and they were highly valued.
There’s one way to tell the difference: Iron from meteorites has a higher nickel content than iron from Earth’s soil.
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So the researchers obtained permission from the Municipal Archaeological Museum of Vilna, which houses the collection, to carefully examine 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 level of corrosion, which alters the original makeup of the artifact, the results strongly suggest that both the hemisphere and the bracelet were made of meteoric iron.
This neatly resolves the dilemma of how the two artifacts fit in with the rest of the collection: they were made around the same period, dating back to around 1400 to 1200 BC.
“Available data suggest that the cap and bracelet from the Vilena hoard would be the first two pieces currently attributed to meteoric iron in the Iberian Peninsula,” the researchers explained in their paper, “which corresponds to the Late Bronze chronology before the widespread production of terrestrial iron.”
Now, because the objects are so badly corroded, the results are not conclusive. But there are more recent, non-invasive techniques that can be applied to the objects to obtain a more detailed set of data that can help cement the findings, the team suggests.
The results were published in Prehistoric Works.
An earlier version of this article was published in February 2024.
