Among a pile of gleaming golden treasures from the Iberian Bronze Age, a pair of corroded objects may be the most precious of them all.
Researchers found that a dull bracelet and a rusty hollow hemisphere decorated with gold were forged from gold, not from the metal in the ground, but from iron from meteorites that fell from the sky.
The discovery, led by Salvador Rovira-Llorens, now retired head of conservation at Spain’s National Archaeological Museum, and revealed in a paper in 2024, shows that Iberian metalworking technology and craftsmanship more than 3,000 years ago were far more advanced than we thought.
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The Villena Treasure, a well-known hoard of 66 gold objects, was discovered over 60 years ago in 1963 in what is now Alicante, Spain, and has since been regarded as one of the most important examples of Bronze Age goldsmiths in the Iberian Peninsula and throughout Europe.
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Dating the collection is somewhat difficult thanks to two objects: a small hollow hemisphere thought to be part of a scepter or sword hilt;
Both have what archaeologists describe as a “black” appearance – that is, they appear to be made of iron.
In the Iberian Peninsula, the Iron Age – when iron smelted on land began to replace bronze – did not begin until around 850 BC.
The problem is that the gold material dates to between 1500 and 1200 BC. Therefore, figuring out the location of these seemingly black artifacts in the Viennese treasure has always been a mystery.
But iron ore in the Earth’s crust isn’t the only source of malleable iron. There are many pre-Iron Age iron objects around the world that were cast from meteorites.
Perhaps the most famous is Pharaoh Tutankhamen’s meteorite dagger, but there were other Bronze Age weapons made from this material, and they are highly valuable.
There’s one way to tell the difference: The iron in meteorites has a much higher nickel content than the iron dug out of Earth’s underground.
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So the researchers obtained permission from the Archaeological Museum of the city of Vienna, where the collection is located, to carefully test the two artifacts and determine how much nickel they contained.
They carefully collected samples of both artifacts and performed mass spectrometry analysis of the material to determine its composition.
Although high levels of corrosion altered the artifact’s elemental makeup, the results strongly suggest that both the hemisphere and bracelet are made of meteorite.
This neatly solves the dilemma of how these two artifacts fit in with the rest of the collection: they were made around the same time, dating to around 1400 to 1200 BC.
“The available data suggest that the hat and bracelet from the Vienna hoard may be the first two pieces of meteorites currently found in the Iberian Peninsula, consistent with a Late Bronze Age chronology before widespread terrestrial iron production began,” the researchers explain in their paper.
Now, the results are unclear because the object is heavily corroded. But the team says there are recently non-invasive techniques that can be applied to these objects to obtain a more detailed set of data that will help solidify the findings.
The research results were published in prehistoric work.
An earlier version of this article was published in February 2024.
