--- title: "Spain’s Treasure of Villena holds two Bronze Age iron pieces made from meteorite metal, tests suggest" url: https://badiyaa.com/treasure-villena-meteoritic-iron-bronze-age/ published: 2026-11-10T10:30:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-10T10:30:00+00:00 section: History publisher: Badiyaa --- # Spain’s Treasure of Villena holds two Bronze Age iron pieces made from meteorite metal, tests suggest Tests on the Treasure of Villena, a Bronze Age gold hoard found in Spain in 1963, indicate its two iron pieces were made from meteorite iron. Two small iron objects buried with a heap of Bronze Age gold in eastern Spain were most likely made from metal that fell from the sky. New chemical analyses of the Treasure of Villena, published in the Spanish archaeology journal *Trabajos de Prehistoria*, argue that both pieces are meteoritic iron. The finding settles part of a puzzle that archaeologists have argued over since the hoard came out of the ground in 1963. Iron is not supposed to show up in a gold cache this old, because people in Iberia had not yet learned to smelt it. ## A dry riverbed full of gold Archaeologist José María Soler found the treasure in December 1963 in the Rambla del Panadero, a dry gully about 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) from the town of Villena in Alicante province. Someone had packed the objects into a pottery vessel of a type known from Cabezo Redondo, a Bronze Age settlement roughly 6.5 kilometers away. A few items lay loose in the gravel, meters from the pot. The hoard counts 59 objects in gold, silver, iron and amber, weighing close to 10 kilograms in total. Nine of those kilograms are 23.5-karat gold, including 11 bowls, three bottles and 28 bracelets. It is the largest prehistoric gold find on the Iberian Peninsula and ranks second in Europe, behind the royal graves at Mycenae in Greece. For a sense of the purity, gold karats are counted out of 24, so 23.5 karats works out to about 97.9 percent pure gold by weight. ## The iron that did not fit Among all that gold sat two iron items: a hollow hemisphere, perhaps a cap or pommel, and a bracelet or open ring. Archaeologists date the hoard to roughly 1300 to 1000 BCE, which raised an awkward question. If the iron came from smelted ore, the whole cache might be younger than it looked. If it came from a meteorite, it could sit comfortably in the Late Bronze Age. Salvador Rovira-Llorens, Martina Renzi and Ignacio Montero Ruiz, the last from the Institute of History at Spain’s national research council (CSIC), tested the pieces with portable X-ray fluorescence and laser ablation mass spectrometry, run at a laboratory in Germany. Their 2023 paper says the results favor a meteoritic origin for both objects. That would place them at some point in the Late Bronze Age before terrestrial iron production began in the region. The authors compared their readings with known iron meteorites, including Mundrabilla, a giant meteorite recovered in Australia whose fragments carry around 8 percent nickel. High nickel is the usual giveaway: iron from space is an iron-nickel alloy, while early smelted iron carries little of it. ## Sky metal across the ancient world Villena joins a short list of Bronze Age objects shaped from fallen meteorites. Placed side by side, the dates show how long this rare metal circulated before smelting took over: - About 3200 BC: iron beads from Gerzeh, Egypt, with 7.5 percent nickel. - About 2500 BC: a dagger from Alaca Höyük in Anatolia. - About 1350 BC: the dagger, bracelet and headrest from the tomb of Tutankhamun. - About 1300 to 1000 BCE: the hemisphere and bracelet from Villena. - About 900 BC: an arrowhead from Mörigen, Switzerland, traced to the Kaali crater in Estonia. The ancient Egyptians even had a phrase for it, usually translated as “metal of the sky.” Iron of that kind was scarce enough to be hoarded as a precious metal, which explains why the Villena pieces were buried next to bowls of nearly pure gold. Earlier finds in our History section include a [Bronze Age spearhead mold that propped up a Czech barn](https://badiyaa.com/czech-barn-stone-bronze-age-spearhead-mold-morkuvky/), and on the Science desk a [rose-colored Sahara meteorite that turned out to be a piece of Mars](https://badiyaa.com/teghaza-001-mars-meteorite-sahara-4-1-billion-years/). The study, “¿Hierro meteórico en el Tesoro de Villena?”, appeared in volume 80, issue 2 of *Trabajos de Prehistoria* on December 30, 2023, under DOI [10.3989/tp.2023.12333](https://doi.org/10.3989/tp.2023.12333). ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Treasure of Villena](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_of_Villena) - [Trabajos de Prehistoria: ¿Hierro meteórico en el Tesoro de Villena?](https://doi.org/10.3989/tp.2023.12333) - [Wikipedia: Meteoric iron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoric_iron) *Image: Julio Garcia, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*