Among the glittering gold treasures of the Pyrenean Bronze Age, a pair of worn objects may be the most valuable. A blunt bracelet and a rusty, hollow hemisphere decorated with gold were discovered by researchers; these were forged not from underground metal, but from the iron of meteors falling from the sky.
The discovery, led by Salvador Rovira-Llorens, now retired head of conservation at Spain’s National Archaeological Museum, was revealed in a paper published in January and suggests that metalworking technology and methods were much more advanced than we thought in Iberia, more than 3,000 years ago. Years ago.
The Villana hoard, which contained 66 mostly gold objects, 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 the Bronze Age. jewelery in 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 staff or sword hilt; and a single torque-like bracelet. Both have what archaeologists describe as an “iron” appearance, meaning they appear to be made of iron.
In the Iberian Peninsula, the Iron Age did not begin until 850 BC, when molten earthen iron began to replace bronze. The problem is that the gold materials date to between 1500 and 1200 BC. So figuring out the whereabouts of the iron artifacts in the context of Villena’s treasures was a puzzle.
However, iron ore in the earth’s crust is not the only source of ductile iron. There are many pre-Iron Age iron artifacts forged from meteorites around the world. Perhaps the most famous is the meteoric iron dagger of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, but there are other Bronze Age weapons made from this material and they are very valuable.
There’s a way to tell the difference: Iron from meteorites has a much higher nickel content than iron mined from the ground. Therefore, the researchers received permission from the Villena Municipal Archaeological Museum, which houses the collection, to carefully examine the two artifacts and determine how much nickel they contained.
They carefully sampled both artifacts and subjected the material to mass spectrometry to determine their composition. Despite the high degree of corrosion altering the elemental composition of the artifact, the results strongly suggest that both the hemisphere and the bracelet are made of meteoric iron.
This neatly resolves the dilemma of how these two works fit in with the rest of the collection: They were made around the same time period and date to around 1400-1200 BC.
“Available evidence suggests that the cap and bracelet from the Villena hoard are the first two items currently attributable to meteoric iron in the Iberian Peninsula,” the researchers explain in their paper. Beginning of widespread production of soil iron”.
The results are inconclusive as the objects are now extremely worn. 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. Prehistoric Trabajos.
Source: Port Altele
