Treasure that is out of this world
Researchers have found that two objects from a collection of treasure made more than 3,000 years ago contain iron from a meteorite. A meteorite is a piece of rock from space that has travelled through the Earth’s atmosphere and landed on the ground.
The treasures were first discovered in 1963 in Villena, Spain. The collection dates back to between 1500BC and 1200BC. Among the 66 objects, which are mostly made from gold, were a bracelet and a hollow decorative sphere, which were made mostly out of iron. This puzzled the research team because working with iron was very unusual in that part of the world at the time the pieces were created.
To find out where this iron had come from, scientists used a special technique to show them how much nickel (another type of metal) the iron contained. They were astonished to find that the treasures contained higher levels of nickel than iron dug up from Earth. Instead, the nickel content was much more similar to that of iron found inside meteorites.
Researchers think that a meteorite containing iron must have fallen in the area, which ancient metalworkers would have then studied to help them learn more about how iron can be used to make objects. The findings suggest that the objects were made by very skilled metalworkers who used techniques that were more advanced than experts had thought was possible in this period. It’s not known who owned the collection of treasures but the experts think it probably belonged to a whole community, not just one person.