Treasure of Villena

The Treasure of Villena is one of the greatest hoard finds of gold of the European Bronze Age. The hoard was found in December 1963, 5 kilometres from Villena. It comprises 59 objects made of gold, silver, iron and amber with a total weight of almost 10 kilograms, 9 of them of 23.5 karat gold. This makes it the most important find of prehistoric gold in the Iberian Peninsula. A pair of corroded objects might be the most precious of all.

A dull bracelet and a rusted hollow hemisphere decorated with gold are forged with iron from a meteorite. They suggest that metalworking technology and techniques in Iberia more than 3,000 years ago were far more advanced than thought. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Iron Age didn't start until around 850 BCE. The problem is that the gold materials have been dated to between 1500 and 1200 BCE. Iron ore from Earth's crust is not the only place source of malleable iron. Pre-Iron Age iron artifacts around the world were forged from meteorites. The most famous is the meteoritic iron dagger of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

The iron pieces are the oldest found in the Iberian Peninsula and correspond to a stage in which iron was considered to be a precious metal, far more valuable than gold, and so was hoarded. Iron from meteorites has a much higher nickel content than iron found on earth. Mass spectrometry was used to determine their composition. In spite of the high degree of corrosion, which alters the elemental makeup of the artifact, both the hemisphere and the bracelet were made from meteoritic iron.