Until now, the story was like this. When troops invaded Europe between 200 B.C. C. and 14 d. C, they found a continent without steel. Many areas handled iron, yes; but it was a rudimentary iron, weak and full of problems.
Until now. Because history has changed.
The mystery of carved stones. The funny thing is that history has changed almost by accident. In recent years, the team led by Ralph Araque Gonzalez, from the University of Freiburg, has worked to discover what kind of tools were used to make stone stelae on the Iberian Peninsula.
And it is that during the Late Bronze Age (from 1200 to 800 BC) and the Early Iron Age (from 800 to 600 BC), the Iberian Peninsula was filled with intricate stone carvings with anthropomorphic figures, animals or images of weapons.
experimental archaeology. The problem is that researching the tools that were used to carve stones is quite complex. In fact, Araque Gonzalez is an experimental archaeologist: that is, he tries to fill in the gaps in material history by reconstructing historical and technological situations.
In this case, they petrologically analyzed the composition of the stelae (most of which were discovered in the Sierra de la Moraleja, in Badajoz) to discover that they were extremely hard stones. very hard Too harsh. They tried bronze, quartzite, and iron tools, but the results were not good.
The Rocha do Vigio chisel. Until they found a chisel composed of 30% ferrite and 70% pearlite. A chisel that, when replicated, did make it possible to make identical inscriptions on a very similar rock.
The Rocha do Vigio site, in the Portuguese Alentejo, left no room for doubt. On the contrary, the site showed “that iron metallurgy, including steel production and tempering, were probably indigenous developments of small centralized communities in Iberia, and not due to the influence of later colonization processes.”
In other words, everything seems to indicate that the Iberian peoples handled steel (and its tempering) 700 years before the arrival of the Roman troops. Rome 0 – Badajoz 1
In Xataka | Paradoxically, almost everything that happens in Game of Thrones has a scientific explanation.
Image | Badajoz Archaeological Museum
