Amidst a cache of gleaming golden treasures from the Iberian Bronze Age, a pair of corroded objects may be the most valuable of all.
A dull bracelet and a rusty hollow hemisphere decorated with gold were forged, researchers found, not from metal from underground, but from iron from meteorites that fell from the sky.
The discovery, led by the now-retired head of conservation at Spain’s National Archaeological Museum, Salvador Rovira-Llorens, was revealed in a paper published in January and suggests that technology and metalworking techniques were far more advanced than previously thought. we thought in Iberia more than 3000 years ago.
The Villena Hoard, as it is known, a cache of 66 mostly gold objects, was discovered more than 60 years ago in 1963 in what is now Alicante in Spain, and has since been considered one of the most important examples of Bronze Age goldsmithing in the Iberian Peninsula and throughout Europe.
Determining the age of the collection was quite difficult to do, however, 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 an “iron” appearance – that is, they appear to be made of iron.
In the Iberian Peninsula, the Iron Age – where molten earth 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 figuring out where the iron-looking artifacts were in the context of Vilena’s hoard was something of a puzzle.
But crustal iron ore is not the only source of malleable iron. There are a number of pre-Iron Age iron artifacts around the world that have been forged from meteorites. Perhaps the most famous is the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s meteoric iron dagger, but there are other Bronze Age weapons made from this material, and they were very highly valued.
There is a way to tell the difference: iron from meteorites has a much higher nickel content than iron mined from the ground. So the researchers got permission from the Municipal Archaeological Museum of Vilna, which houses the collection, to carefully test the two artifacts and determine exactly how much nickel they contain.
They carefully sampled both artifacts and subjected the material to mass spectrometry to determine their composition. Despite the high degree of corrosion that altered the elemental composition of the artifact, the results strongly suggest that both the hemisphere and the bracelet are made of meteoritic iron.
This clearly resolves the dilemma of how the two artifacts square with the rest of the collection: they were made around the same period, dating from about 1400 to 1200 BC.
“Available evidence suggests that the cap and bracelet from the Vilena hoard would currently be the first two pieces attributed to meteoric iron in the Iberian Peninsula,” the researchers explain in their paper, “which is compatible with a Late Bronze chronology, prior to the onset of widespread production of earthy iron.”
Now, because the objects are so badly corroded, the results are inconclusive. But there are newer, non-invasive techniques that could be applied to the objects to obtain a more detailed set of data that would help strengthen the findings, the team suggests.
The findings are published in Trabajos de Prehistoria.
An earlier version of this article was published in February 2024.
