When Iron Fell from the Sky: Meteorite Metal Before the Iron Age
Long before iron was routinely smelted from ore, people were already making beads, blades, axes and ornaments from metallic iron delivered naturally to Earth in meteorites. A newly studied object from Sanxingdui joins a small but revealing corpus that stretches from Predynastic Egypt to Bronze Age China and the Aegean, raising a harder question than provenance alone: what did this rare metal mean to the people who possessed it?
