posted 05-21-2006 06:54 AM            

Hi! I am a new member who is delighted to have come across this wonderful place with so many cordial, intelligent, and knowledgeable people. I hope I can keep up with you all!

I recently acquired a piece of what appears to be dreadfully old silver & coconut shell. The unmarked silver work is not all that unusual, but the carving on the coconut appears to be entirely unique. I researched this online and in my books until I finally had to give up and sent a photo of the piece to the British Museum's international antiquities department to ask if the curators would recognize the carving. They did not; saying it was unlike anything they had seen from their section of the world (Europe, Asia, Africa, etc., but not the Americas or Australia). They did suggest that it appeared to have been a possible attempt to mimic the Romanesque style, just maybe, but they were real uncertain about that. I don't know -- it could be American; it slightly resembles an ancient prehistoric carving I saw on the Virgin island of St. John, and it slightly resembles the spirally cave carvings of Ireland. I AM LOST! Any feedback will be appreciated. Here's the link to the only way I know how to publicly post a photo. Please click on the link since the page is HTML and won't display here:

posted 05-21-2006 10:24 AM            

Thank you for your thoughts on the cup. You could very well be right.

posted 05-22-2006 07:32 AM            

"Dear Ms Lewis

I saw an interesting reference yesterday to two chocolate cups, 16th C Spanish-American, in the Bargello in Florence made from coconuts. They have similar handles to yours and similar leaf-shaped foot mount, also carved decoration on the bowl. If this is of interest to you, please send me your address and I can photocopy the reference for you. They are of the same type, certainly."

posted 05-22-2006 10:28 PM            

If you would like to see better pictures of the cup, in color and not contrast-amped, please do get in touch with me and give me your e-mail address so I can send you PhotoShop files.

Thank you!

posted 05-23-2006 02:00 AM            

I read that these cups do occasionally have maker's marks inside the silver mounts. Therefore, I thought a good cleaning might reveal a mark somewhere under all that thick black oxidation. I have no evidence yet because I am so very carefully removing the tarnish as I do not wish to wear down the silver itself. I have noticed that ALL museums who display ancient silver have removed all the tarnish from the metal. I am a professional fine artist (sometimes, when I am not training horses) and understand the need to restore an object without destroying it. This piece has clearly not been cleaned on the inside of the mounts since it was put together in its original incarnation. If there are any marks, they are entirely obscured by a thick black layer, so removing that thick black layer will not lessen the historical value of the object. If you disagree and can provide any pictures of ancient silver displayed by a museum which has not cleaned their treasure of its tarnish, I would love to see said pictures. Whenever I see old silver on display that has not been cleaned, it is because it is for sale by persons who suggest that tarnish is a good thing (American per-revolutionary antiquities excepted) because they know that tarnish hides a multitude of flaws and damage. I am now going to open a parcel containing a supposed 18th century American candle snuffer which has never been cleaned. I wonder how many shortcomings are hiding under that thick layer of tarnish? We shall see, though I will use a jeweler's loupe rather than metal polish to gain a good view. But I do thank you for expressing your opinion. If I were trying to sell this coconut cup, which I am not, your suggestion would be spot-on. I would like to mention that the incredibly delicate carving on the shell was extended to the portions under the silver mounts and styled to fit the shape of the silver; done very finely. I don't think anyone in the late 18th or 19th centuries would have taken the time to do such delicate, difficult, and intricate carving in a place where it would never be seen.

Okay -- time to scan an unusual Scottish caudal cup so a proper Scottish silver expert can tell me what's going on with it. Thanks so much for expressing your ideas about my old cup!

posted 05-23-2006 09:54 AM            

A silver dealer in the UK recommended that I not use my cyanide and instead should use toothpaste. Toothpaste did a great job of removing a heavy layer of tarnish from my Victorian teapot, but it also removed the shine and left the object looking dull. Fortunately, I think I can fix it. However, I wanted to let you know that I test cleaning solutions on my Victorian stuff before I use it on anything Georgian or older. There is a great responsibility that goes along with collecting antique silver. I will bequeath this particular piece, along with my other older pieces, to a museum when I make out my will. I greatly appreciate your reminder that silver is eternal while I am merely a mortal who will be dust a few decades from now.

posted 05-23-2006 05:32 PM            

(BTW My DH's favorite movie.)

If you check out a well known auction site for completed auctions a similar silver coconut cup is there. Don't know if their information will help you.

Jersey

posted 05-24-2006 12:53 PM            

Later we found a proper lab and had the test redone. The results were much more informative. FYI it was a fake, the trace elements were nominal so it was 18th century silver that was made using 20th century silver (after electrolytic refining).

You have to have the right lab. One with the proper experience to provide you with a reasonable analyst that conforms with your goals.

posted 05-26-2006 07:31 AM            

If the coconut is old it still doesn't necessarily mean that the silver mounts are...

posted 05-26-2006 10:29 AM            

Theobroma cacao does have a recognizable signature, and has been identified on numerous archaeological pieces of Mayan pottery. The theory of my friends who are doing this work is that the earliest use of cacao was as fermented beverages, and I have made some experimental brews to see what this might have been like (not very pleasant to the modern western palate, rather thin and of course bitter). I know of no studies looking at the formulae of blends through spectrographic analysis, but it's certainly possible they've been done, or could be done.

A regular radiocarbon date only costs a few hundred dollars, but for something like this you'd probably want to use accelerator dating, to work from as small a sample as possible, and those still cost in the (low) thousands I believe. Personally I wouldn't waste the money and lab time, since you'd most likely get a result something like "90BP +/- 75" -- in other words, a 68% chance that the sample originated between 1785 and 1935, or a 96% chance that it originated between 1710 and 2010. People tend to forget the error or uncertainty factor in radiocarbon dating; I've had dates returned with much larger ranges than that.

This is a perfectly nice example of a Spanish colonial silver-mounted coconut cup. I'd recommend enjoying it as is, for what it is.

posted 05-26-2006 05:10 PM            

You wrote "Theobroma cacao does have a recognizable signature." How does one go about obtaining and interpreting this signature?

Perhaps in the future, someone will develop an affordable and exact means of determing age. I am not willing to spend thousands of dollars just for the fun of satisfying my curiosity. Perhaps I will be able to somewhere find a sample of scrimshaw-type carving that exactly matches the decorative style of my coconut. I have seen many cups that look ALMOST exactly like mine, but I have never seen one with the same visual style of embellishment. I have good eyes for this, having been a professional photorealist artist for quite some time.

posted 05-26-2006 10:27 PM            

I finally decided that the odds of me getting poisoned by tasting the residue in this cup were pretty low, especially when one considers that Europeans paid high prices for coconut cups because they were supposed to neutralize poison. Bet that worked real well . . .

Anyway, I scraped out some of the dark brown material and it has no taste at all. Maybe taste disappears after a hundred years or so? When I visit my silversmith to get his feedback on the construction techniques used on the silver mounts, which are extremely crude compared to my silver made in England during the late 18th century, I can get the name of the chemist they use to maybe find out if there was a combination of chocolate and hot peppers served in there. That might give a clue as to who drank from the cup and wouldn't cost thousands of dollars, I hope.

posted 05-27-2006 03:22 AM            

Today I cleaned a little more tarnish off the insides of the silver mounts and went over them with a 30x loupe. I found a crudely done Spanish assayer's test mark ("buradilla"). I also did several scans of parts of the cup and will strive to get them into a form which can be posted here. The scans aren't very good; the depth of field is dreadful and the exposures refuse to be color-correct and accurate. I think I need to learn how to use a digital camera. I do find the way that the base was finished off at the edge to be unusual in my experience.

posted 05-27-2006 10:34 AM            

Another factor I had left out is calibration. Radiocarbon dates are reported as radiocarbon years BP (BP=Before Present, with present defined as 1950). But atmospheric carbon isotope ratios are not stable over time, so in converting to calendrical dates one has to also consult calibration tables that give correction factors for different ages. (Incidentally, this is almost never done with dates reported in the news, so when one converts reported C14 dates to the calendar they are seldom really accurate.) If anyone is really curious about this process, I published a piece back in 1988 called "A rose by any other name: Questions of Mockley chronology" in the Journal of Middle Atlantic Archaeology, which explored the effects of calibrating a series of dates.

The theobroma cacao signature was determined using spectrographic analysis. It was not my project, and I don't know the lab that did the work. I'm not sure if it's been published yet; I've just seen presentations on the work. But I believe the process was to do an analysis of fresh, known cacao to develop the signature (different substances when vaporized create distinctive elemental signatures). Archaeological samples (the insides of pots first, and then even potsherds) were then subjected to the same analysis, with the results compared to the known theobroma cacao signature. It was actually a very important and exciting test, as it had not previously been established that this could be possible in cases with no visible residue. It established that certain classes of Mayan pottery were in fact used with chocolate, and combined with some Mayan iconography and historically documented usage is changing the ways that Mayan chocolate use is understood.

posted 05-27-2006 09:43 PM            

Okay -- "theobroma ("Food of the Gods") cacao" [if anyone knows how to do proper italics on a Mac for Latin phrases in this website program so I can stop using quotes, I would appreciate knowing how to do it] was mixed with hot chili peppers and wine when consumed by the Aztecs. I would like to test for traces of those substances.

I will search this site for examples of buradillas, and if I find nothing helpful I will haul my ankle cast and myself off to the nearest store to purchase a digital camera so I can ask for more feedback from the amazingly well-informed members of this site.

posted 05-28-2006 01:52 PM            

quote:

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if anyone knows how to do proper italics on a Mac for Latin phrases in this website program so I can stop using quotes, I would appreciate knowing how to do it

---

posted 05-29-2006 10:01 AM            

Re: the zig zag line
From The Guide To Evaluating Gold & Silver:

• Scrape mark or diet - A gouged line (often a zig-zag line) where a portion of silver has been removed for the purpose of an assay to test its quality. Sometimes these lines are later polished away, but they are often seen intact, especially on articles of Continental manufacture.

posted 05-29-2006 04:06 PM            

Can you enlarge the marks on the Spanish Colonial plate you showed. So many of these plates appear and most are forgeries.

The term I am familiar for these assay scraping marks is "buriladas". Burilar is Spanish for the verb to engrave and buril is the word for burin or graver. I believe I first saw this term correctly used in Boylan's book on Spanish Colonial Silver. I have seen the term buradilla used often when speaking of these assay scrapings. I do not know where this term came from originally and find no Spanish word that might lead one to use this term. It would be interesting to discover it's origin and which term is correct.

Somewhere I have an old book on Spanish Colonial by Arizpe and will look to see if he uses a term for the wriggle marks used to remove silver for testing.

Fred

posted 05-29-2006 05:07 PM            

The assay mark on my cup resembles a zig-zag except that the short lines are unconnected; it looks more like someone took a tiny chisel and made a close-set line of diagonal hyphens. I learned last night that my new camera does a very good job with clear macro closeups, so once I figure out the software on the computer, I can post a photo of the assay marks. I wonder if the fact that there is nothing other than the test marks means this piece failed to pass?

posted 05-29-2006 11:01 PM            

The marks are intended to be the marks of Chief Assayer Cayetano Buitron and would help date the plate to 1823-43. These marks are some of the most forged marks in Spanish Colonial silver items from Mexico. I suspect these are forged marks. Newer dictionaries use grabar for to engrave while I beleive buril is an older perhaps archaic word. It will take me some time to find my Arizpe book to see if he describes the engraved wriggle work used by the assayer. Does anyone own a copy of Anderson's books on Spanish colonial silver. Would be interesting to see if he discribes the process used and the term used.

Fred

posted 05-30-2006 11:39 AM            

It's not that burilar is more archaic than grabar, but more specialized. A grabador is a graver (generic term); a buril is a burin (specialized term). English uses 'engrave' to cover both uses (although I believe 'burinate' might be an archaic verb form; I can't get to my OED to check).

And the correct term is of course burilada, not buradilla; I wasn't thinking when I repeated the latter term, or perhaps had been too long immersed in internet usages rather than proper Spanish....