Strange metal from extraterrestrial world appears in ancient treasure

Replicas of artifacts from the Treasure of Villena in Spain. Photo: Lanmas/Alamy .

In February 2024, analysis revealed that a trove of artifacts dubbed the "Treasure of Villena", discovered by archaeologists in a pit in the province of Alicante, Spain, contained objects made from extraterrestrial metals, specifically meteorite iron.

However, archaeologists have had difficulty dating two particular objects, a small hollow hemisphere, thought to be part of a staff or sword handle, and a bracelet in the style of a torc necklace.

To verify this information, the researchers asked permission from the Villena Municipal Archaeological Museum, where the treasure is kept, to carefully sample the two objects and determine exactly how much nickel they contained.

According to theory, iron from meteorites contains much higher concentrations of nickel than iron mined from the ground. Based on this, the archaeologists carefully sampled both objects and used mass spectrometry to determine their composition.

Although the high degree of corrosion altered the original elemental composition of the object, the results strongly support that both the hemisphere and the bracelet were made of meteoric iron.

This neatly solved the problem of how the two objects fit with the rest of the treasure, allowing archaeologists to determine that they were made in the same period, dating from around 1400-1200 BC.

“The available data suggest that the lid and bracelet from the Villena treasure would now be the first two pieces of meteorite iron in the Iberian Peninsula,” the researchers explain.

At present, because both of these objects are heavily corroded, the research results cannot completely confirm the hypothesis.

However, the team believes that modern, non-invasive techniques can be used to collect more detailed data sets, thereby further corroborating the findings of artifacts made from extraterrestrial materials.