🔎 UNIDENTIFIED Need help identifying

Whatdayagot

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Tpmetal

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Jan 4, 2017
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to determine bone/ivory from plastic, heat up a pin red hot and poke bottom. Bone and ivory will do nothing, plastics and most fakes the pin will melt in. Now to determine ivory from bone is different and slightly more difficult, and determining elephant ivory from say a walrus tusk is even more difficult than that if not impossible in some cases for the average joes like you and I.
 

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ARC

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Aug 19, 2014
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Looks like ivory to me, but I'm no expert.
The concentric rings on the base (like a tree) are what I'm going by.
Its called Schreger lines.. they are not rings though.... more commonly called "cross hatchings"... for the lines cross over each other in a criss cross pattern.
BUT... several other types of animal tusks do in fact have rings.... and yes like a tree has.
 

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Emil W

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Nov 4, 2021
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It's an ivory tourist piece. Most obvious giveaway is in the last photo where you can see the grain. It is illegal to sell in the US since you don't have provenance showing age, date of acquisition, species, and seller. Fines for attempting a sale without proper documentation are large, in this case many thousands of times greater than the items value.
 

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ARC

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to determine bone/ivory from plastic, heat up a pin red hot and poke bottom. Bone and ivory will do nothing, plastics and most fakes the pin will melt in. Now to determine ivory from bone is different and slightly more difficult, and determining elephant ivory from say a walrus tusk is even more difficult than that if not impossible in some cases for the average joes like you and I.
JFYI... you can easily tell between bone and ivory using hot pin test...Bone smells like burning hair when hot pin is used.
 

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Tpmetal

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Yes... you can easily tell between bone and ivory using hot pin test...Bone smells like burning hair when hot pin is used.
I did say SLIGHTLY more difficult, as both produce a nasty smell that the average person who has not tested both may not be able to tell the difference with just the pin test. Other things they can look for is in bone the remnants of the structures that delivered blood that are often decribed as flakes or small channels, vrs the ivory which has faint long tubular structure. So yeah not as simple as testing between the plastic fakes, and not as complicated as determining which animal it came from if heavily carved.
 

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ARC

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Bone and ivory look very similar in appearance at first glance... but they really do not have same look.
Bone has a porous surface... unless polished highly... it is easily ID'd by this alone.
 

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ARC

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Aug 19, 2014
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There are many types of ivory... the Op's is Elephant... and by motif and crude-ness it would have definitely been made in Africa... and yes as mentioned... for the tourist trade.
I wish the pictures were clearer and closer of certain areas... these can be good fakes and the ops pics are slightly deceiving in a couple shots.
 

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