Meteorite

Nature and Culture

Reaktion Books 2015

Pb, 208pp, illus, £14.95, ISBN 9781780234977

FORTEAN TIMES BOOKSHOP PRICE £13.49

Few, if any, strange phenomena have made the transit from scholarly dismissal to universal acceptance as cleanly as meteorites did in the years around 1800. In 1790 the assistant director of the Imperial Natural History Collection at Vienna described previous beliefs that iron fell from Heaven as ‘fairy tales’, an indictment of the ‘terrible ignorance then prevailing of natural history and practical physics’. Within 20 years the weight of evidence – stratum geology, chemical analysis and credible witness reports – had converted these beliefs into scientific orthodoxy. Maria Golia opens her enjoyable survey with this historical controversy and shows that meteorites still occupy an anomalous space where science, myth, art, commerce and apocalypse collide. The voices captured at the moment of the 2013 Russian fireball (‘Judgment Day!’; ‘I don’t want to die!’; ‘What the fuck?!’) echo the awe that inspired meteor worship from the ancient Egyptians to the Hopi to the Aboriginal Australians.

All these cultures held the modern scientific view that the objects of their veneration were of extraterrestrial origin, along with a dizzying spectrum of other beliefs (fans of Tintin’s The Shooting Star will be pleased to learn that the association of meteors and mushrooms has a long pedigree). The emperor Elagabalus hauled a meteorite back to Rome in a gilded chariot and installed it on the Palatine hill. The jury is still out on whether the Black Stone in the Ka’aba at Mecca is a meteorite.

Before the era of metallurgy, meteorites were for most peoples the only native source of iron-rich alloy. They were the source for metal beads found in an Egyptian burial site dated to 3300 BC, and for earrings unearthed in prehistoric Ohio burial sites. ‘Lightning iron’ has retained its preternatural power ever since. A meteoric knife was buried with Tutankhamun, and a gold-inlaid extraterrestrial dagger made in 1621 for the Mogul emperor Jahangir can be seen at the Smithsonian. It has recently been claimed that the Tibetan ‘Iron Man’ statue discovered by the Nazis in 1938 is part of the Chinga meteorite that fell in Mongolia around 15,000 years ago [ FT295:4].

The ancient awe of meteorites is expressed in the modern age by a collectors’ market in which they can fetch, ounce for ounce, a thousand times the price of gold. Competitive collecting dates back to the age of empire, when patriotic claims were staked on meteor fields and exhibitions mounted to far-flung territories to haul back specimens.

Harvey Nininger’s life was changed when he witnessed a fireball explode over Kansas in 1923. For 50 years he criss-crossed the American West amassing a collection that was eventually purchased by major institutions including the British Museum.

More recently they have been introduced to the topend art market by Darryl Pitt, who presents them as ‘natural art from outer space’. Pitt has snatched even the rarest and most expensive meteorites, such as those from the Moon and Mars, from under the noses of museums and scientific researchers to sell to Saudi princes and movie royalty including Steven Spielberg and Armageddon star Bruce Willis.

Meteorite is an object of beauty, with the sumptuous colour illustration we have come to expect from Reaktion’s natural history monographs. The images include ancient artefacts, pulp illustrations, ethnographic tableaux and stunning aerial photography of craters, but focus primarily on the meteorites: portraits that reveal the patterns sculpted by heat and g-forces in their passage through the atmosphere, and precision-cut magnified sections that turn their fine-grained structures into kaleidoscopic works of art.