Scientists Identify Meteoric Composition of 2,700-Year-Old Burial Jewelry

New analysis of 26 jewelry artifacts unearthed 60 years ago at early Iron Age graveyards in Poland — and stored unceremoniously at the Częstochowa Museum — revealed that five of them were crafted from meteoric metal.

Armed with cutting-edge technology, Polish and French scientists recently revisited the 2,700-year-old objects extracted from burial sites at Częstochowa-Raków and Częstochowa-Mirów, and were surprised to learn that the jewelry was fabricated from an exceedingly rare meteoric iron.

Three bracelets, an ankle ring and a pin all contained iron with a uniquely high concentration of nickel. It’s a type of iron characteristic common to ataxites, a rare type of iron meteorite.

The scientists conducted their analysis using X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (p-XRF), as well as scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive spectroscopy (SEM/EDS).

Their findings were recently published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

According to archaeologymag.com, the jewelry items date back to about 750–600 BC and are linked to the Lusatian culture, which flourished in the areas that are now Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, eastern Germany and western Ukraine.

Unlike other cultures, such as the Egyptians, who revered meteoric metal, the Lusatians simply saw the heaven-sent material as a handy resource. Lusatian metalworkers didn’t hesitate to combine meteoritic iron with terrestrial iron to achieve special patterns, and the distribution of the meteoric jewelry throughout the grave site didn’t seem to be determined by gender, age or social status.

The scientists believe that the jewelry artifacts represent the oldest know version of patterned iron, predating both the wootz and Damascus steel patterning techniques by hundreds of years.

Credit: Jewelry image via Częstochowa Museum/Archeologia Żywa/Facebook. Cemetery photo by Andrzej Otrębski, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.