Meteoritic iron artefacts redux

Abstract

The earliest iron artefacts are often presented as products made of meteoritic iron, which is characterised by its high iron content. However, recent studies have shown that high nickel and iron content cannot be taken as a firm criterion for establishing its meteoritic origin. The most effective tool for helping to specify the elemental composition in such cases is a metallographic analysis. It turns out that the material of many artefacts regarded as having been forged from meteoritic iron could in fact be bloomery iron. An analysis of ample yet scattered evidence suggests that the production of items from meteoritic iron could in fact be irregular and sporadic.

An Arrowhead Made of Meteoritic Iron from the Late Bronze Age Settlement of Mörigen, Switzerland and its Possible Source

“…Metallic iron was available to humans in the form of rare meteoritic iron before the smelting of the metal from oxide ores started. The use of meteoritic iron for the fabrication of objects in pre-Iron Age times in Eurasia and northern Africa is known from find complexes in Turkey, Greece, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Russia and China (Rickard 1941;Shramko et al, 1965;Shramko 1981;Bjorkman 1973;Buchwald 2005;Johnson et al, 2013;Rehren et al, 2013;Comelli et al, 2016;Johnson and Tyldesley 2016;Matsui et al, 2022;Ströbele et al, 2016;Broschat et al, 2018;Chen et al, 2018;Jambon and Doumet-Serhal, 2018;Zavyalov and Terekhova, 2019; see Supplementary materials Table S1). Finds of meteoritic iron artefacts in central and western Europe are very rare and up to now restricted to two sites in Poland: The two Czestochowa-Rakowa bracelets (Jambon 2017;Kotowiecki 2004;Piaskowski 1982) and the Wietrzno axe (Kotowiecki 2004;Jambon 2017).…”