 |
| Photo: eBay |
Starting bid: US $4,717,000
Provenance: Ownership History Not Available. Material: Stone
Item location: Keaau, Hawaii, United States Ships to: United States
In all my years of collecting macabre antiques, I've never come across anything, that in time, I could logically explain. I would stare at this skull for hours. The texture, the color, the tool marks, the mixing of stone and metal. None of it made sense. I couldn't come up with anything that provided me a logical explanation. That way, I could put it down and find the next mystery. I couldn't even muster up a theory until I found a picture with the same hollowed out look and peculiar suborbital (sic) ridges. It took me to an article that answered almost every question I had. It spoke of tribes that branched out of inner Mongolia and eventually to South America. It explained these tribes and their expertise in metallurgy. They formed tools out of the metals they found in meteorites. How they were able to fuse stone and metal. These were the same tribes responsible for the infamous crystal skulls. They appeared around 10,000 B.C. and disappeared sometime around the Jade Age roughly 2250 B.C. The same time I believe this skull was made. I've had geologists examine it. I even went as far as running it through a battery of spectrometer tests to determine its make up. I was just blown away. I had geologists shaking their heads. It's about the size of a softball and weighs 2.75 lbs. I love this thing, but a news story about an old Hawaiian carving that sold for 5.7 million dollars. I live on the Big Island of Hawaii and have found some amazing things here. [...] I'm inserting a link to the original article that scratched my itch [...]. If you're filthy rich, and want to own something amazing this is your chance. If you're a serious buyer, I will send you a PDF file of it's (sic) make up. It contains uranium, so it's not native to the island. So here it is, something cooler than the crystal skulls. Please serious inquiries only. Mahalo
To be fair to Piercingpappa, he does say "Before the Panama Canal opened in 1915, every well to do aristocrat that came here by boat [presumably he means from Europe], had to round Cape Horn to get here. There must have been countless stops in South America" suggesting the object might be a recent import to the island from there, rather than an ancient find.
It is quite interesting to see here a collector giving an account of the way he uses the decontextualised artefact: 'I've never come across anything, that in time, I could logically explain. I would stare at this skull for hours. The texture, the color, the tool marks, the mixing of stone and metal. None of it made sense. I couldn't come up with anything that provided me a logical explanation. That way, I could put it down and find the next mystery. I couldn't even muster up a theory until I found a picture with the same hollowed out look and peculiar suborbital (sic) ridges. It took me to an article that answered almost every question I had'.In other words, 'looks-like' superficial comparison, 'theorising' (unless based on a specific methodology = guessing), until finally making uncritical reference to a second-person text treated as an 'authority', 'explaining' the 'mystery'. I think there would be less of a mystery if the owner knew just where and how this artefact entered the market. Probably by the same route as the majority of the 'crystal skulls'.
Anyway, we see how easy antiquitism is, free speculation, imagination, and a few haphazard mouse clicks leading to random 'alt-pasts' mean that everyone can construct their own past, and intellectual relativism means archaeologists, heads-down, contemplating their own navels, do not have to bother their heads about confronting this sort of thing. Where is this leading?
No comments:
Post a Comment