The Danebury meteorite
A small meteorite dug up by archaeologists from a pit inside an Iron Age hillfort.
Key facts
- Found
- 1974
- Where
- Danebury hillfort, near Andover, Hampshire
- Type
- H6 ordinary chondrite
- Mass
- 30 g
- Where it is kept
- University of Oxford collections
- Nation today
- England
In 1974 archaeologists excavating Danebury, a large Iron Age hillfort in Hampshire, found a small dark stone of 30 grams about 70 centimetres down in one of the many storage pits dug by the fort's inhabitants more than 2,000 years ago. It was kept with the other finds, and only in 1989 was it recognised as a meteorite.
Danebury is an H6 ordinary chondrite. It has no fusion crust left, which is what you would expect after a long time in the ground: Britain's damp climate rusts the metal grains and slowly breaks meteorites down.
Whether the people of Danebury picked it up deliberately, or it simply ended up in the pit with soil and rubbish, cannot be known. Either way it is one of only a handful of meteorites from archaeological sites anywhere, and one of only four meteorites ever found, rather than seen to fall, in the UK.
Did you know?
Danebury was recognised as a meteorite 15 years after it was dug up.
It is the smallest meteorite found in Britain.
Find out more
- Danebury in the catalogue: the official class and recorded mass
- H chondrites: what this kind of meteorite is and where it comes from
- All the meteorites of Britain and Ireland, with a map
- Found something in the UK or Ireland? What to do next