Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- An ancient Spanish treasure discovered in 1963 yielded some surprising results when testing showed that pieces were made from meteorite iron—a timeline that didn’t make historical sense.
- The treasure features multiple gold items and has been dated to the Iberian Bronze Age.
- The 66-item find is known as the Treasure of Villena, and is housed in Spain.
Controversy has long swirled around an ancient gold-filled treasure discovered in 1963. Not because of arguments over who owns the 66-piece find, but rather, over just exactly what is included in the mix. The key sticking point? An open bracelet or ring and a hollow semisphere, easily two of the less glamorous pieces in the collection known as the Treasure of Villena.
In 2023, a meteorite seemingly answered all the questions.
In a study published in Trabajos de Prehistoria, data supported “both pieces being made of meteoritic iron, implying the possibility of locating their chronology at some point in the Late Bronze Age prior to the beginning of the production of terrestrial iron.”
On December 1, 1963, archaeologist Jose Maria Soler discovered a set of 66 pieces ranging in metals and including bowls, bracelets, bottles, and gold ornaments. Some pieces mix metals—there are three silver bottles, an iron bracelet, another iron piece with gold ornaments, and an amber and gold button. In total, according to the Jose Maria Soler Archaeological Museum, the collection features nearly 22 pounds of gold and is “considered the most important prehistoric treasure in Europe.”
While iron isn’t as flashy as gold, the origin of the iron in the collection had puzzled experts for decades. That’s because the dating of the gold found on the Iberian Peninsula worked out to sometime between 1200 BC and possibly as far back as 1500 BC. But the Iron Age and terrestrial iron smelting wasn’t happening on the peninsula before 850 BC at the earliest. That means the iron-looking elements from the Treasure of Villena presented a dating problem.
It was a weird timeline quirk—but decades later, a meteorite made it even weirder.
The 2023 study analyzed the nickel content from the two pieces, showing that the high nickel content falls in line with iron originating from a meteor.
The study took small samples of both items for mass spectrometry readings. While the high levels of corrosion didn’t present a fully conclusive result, it still gave the authors enough certainty to claim that a meteorite was the source of the iron metal found in the treasure.
Not only does the finding line up with the age of the gold from the Treasure of Villena, but it also means this is the first known existence of meteoritic iron used in production on the Iberian Peninsula.
“Iron was as valuable as gold or silver, and in this case [it was] used for ornaments or decorative purposes,” study coauthor Ignacio Montero Ruiz, a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council’s Institute of History, told Smithsonian magazine.
Montero Ruiz noted that using “unusual raw material” shows that a highly skilled metalworker was developing new technologies. For the pieces to get included in the treasure mixture—thought to be from an entire community rather than one individual—showed their “enormous value.”
