Among the cache of brilliant gold treasures from the Iberian Bronze Age, a pair of corroded objects may be the most precious of all.
A dumb bracelet and a rusty hollow hemisphere, decorated with gold, have found, not from metal from under the earth, but with iron from meteorites that fell from the sky.
The discovery led by the retired preservation leader at the Spain National Archaeological Museum, Salvador Rovira-Lorens, was discovered in a document published last year, and suggests that the technology and techniques of metalworking are far more advanced than we thought more in Iberia more in Iberia than that more than the technology for metalworking and techniques are far more advanced than we thought in Iberia more than more From metalworking technology and techniques are far more advanced than we have thought more than Iberia more than Iberia more than Iberia more than Iberia more than Iberia more than Iberia more than Iberia more than Iberia more 3,000 years ago S
Vilena’s treasure, as the cache was known to 66 mostly gold objects, was discovered more than 60 years ago in 1963. What is now Alicante in Spain, and has since been considered one of the most important examples of the Bronze Age Goldsmithing on the Iberian Peninsula and all over Europe.
However, determining the age of the collection was a little difficult to do, thanks to two sites: a small, hollow hemisphere considered part of a scepter or sword’s hip; And a single Torc bracelet. Both have what archaeologists have described as a “iron” species – that is, they seem to be made of iron.
In the Iberian Peninsula, the Iron Age – where the melted ground iron begins to replace bronze – does not start around 850 BC. The problem is that the gold materials are dated between 1500 and 1200 BC. So to develop where black -looking artifacts sit in the context of Willen’s treasure is something like a puzzle.
But the iron ore from the Earth’s crust is not the only source in place of black iron. There are a number of iron artifacts before iron around the world that have been forged by meteorites. Perhaps the most famous is the meteorite iron of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, but there are other bronze -era weapons made by the material, and they were very highly valued.
There is a way to say the difference: the iron from the meteorites has a much higher nickel content from the iron dug from the earth on Earth. Thus, the researchers received permission from the Municipal Archaeological Museum of Vilena, which houses the collection, to carefully test the two artifacts and to determine how much nickel they contain.
They carefully took samples from both artifacts and subjected the material to the masspectrometry to determine their composition. Despite the high degree of corrosion, which changes the elementary composition of the artifact, the results strongly suggest that both the hemisphere and the bracelet are made of meteorite iron.
This neatly decides the dilemma of how the two artifacts are aligned with the rest of the collection: they are made around the same period, dating from about 1400 to 1200 BC.
“The available data suggest that the cap and bracelet from the Willen treasure will currently be the first two pieces attributed to meteorite iron in the Iberian Peninsula,” the researchers explain in their document, “which is compatible with late bronze chronology, previously prev. Production of ground iron.
Now, since the objects are so poorly corroded, the results are not categorical. But there are more recent, non-invasive techniques that could be applied to the objects to get a more detailed set of data that would help to cement the findings, the team suggests.
The findings were published in Prehistoric workS
A larger version of this article was published in February 2024.