Were meteorites used as a source of of iron during the Bronze Age and earlier? I happened to read two comments that claimed as such, during a discussion about the importance of meteorite metal in legends and myths.
Not anymore, but back when metallurgy wasn't as advanced, meteorite iron was of higher quality than forged iron.
More to the point, meteorites were the only workable source of iron during the bronze age, so if you could get an iron sword when everyone else was using bronze. Even more true during the stone age--the Inuit were using cold-worked iron off a meteorite when they didn't have anything besides stone tools.
How accurate are these comments? Are there any sources that describe ancient iron tools forged from meteorites?
I don't know about the specific claims about the Inuit, but it's true that meteoric iron is way more pure than anything people could smelt from ore for a very long time. This is because you need to get iron really hot before it melts, which makes it really hard to get all the non-iron rock and stuff out of a lump of ore. The more slag you don't manage to get out of the iron, the lower quality the resulting metal will be
Here's a very cool Nova episode about a blacksmith's attempt at recreating a particular make of Norse sword. It doesn't get into meteoric iron specifically, but there is a pretty good rundown of early iron smelting techniques and how they improved over time
Meteorites were probably used as a source of metal to manufacture objects of various types long before man was able to smelt iron ores, as it was the case not long ago with Eskimos and various African tribes. Drawing on results from the comparative study of languages, we know that the word iron in many laguages is related to the concept of heaven or star, for example, the Greek word for iron (sideros) and the latin word for star (sidera). In Egyptian the word for iron means metal from heaven, and in the inventory of the treasure house of a Hittite king iron is recorded as iron from heaven, while gold and silver are listed from various mines.
Heide, F., Wlotzka, F.: Meteorites. Messengers from space.- Springer, 1995, p. 82
From an astronomical viewpoint, meteorites aren't very common, and many aren't iron based. There are "rocky" meteorites and ones made of carbon based compounds. The majority of meteorites burn up or are shattered during atmospheric entry. Think, how often do you hear of large meteors like fireballs/bolides? While they happen very often around the world as a whole, the chance of any one region getting one is pretty low over any reasonably short period.
This is a purely astronomical viewpoint. I don't know enough to say anything for sure, as I'm no expert on ancient metallurgy, but, to my knowledge, the amount of meteorites is too low for more than a couple weapons to be made from iron in any one region.