Ancient Artifacts

[Martin Hash]

When I was younger, I used to collect a lot of bizarre and macabre items because they were fascinating; still are actually, but wisdom takes a lot of the naive fun out of it. For example, one of my prized possessions is a 500-year old Tibetan Offering Dish, intricately carved, plated on the inside with silver, and with a band of small silver skulls around the rim. That's bizarre, but what makes it macabre is that it's made out of the top of a human skull. I keep it on the shelf in my office, and show it to unsuspecting guests who I ask to guess what it is. None can. I used to hand it to them so they could examine it closely, and so it would be in their hands when I told them, but after a couple close calls of people almost excitedly dropping it, I now keep a firm grip on the precious item before revealing its nature.

Tibetan Offering Dish.JPG

I have lots of odd stuff in my collection from traveling: in Western Sahara, along the ridges of the endless red dunes, I found some ancient pottery shards and a spear point. On the Greek island of Delos, I found a two-millennia old pottery shard. I also have old Mayan civilization fragments, and Native American arrowheads. Best of all, my dinosaur bone collection is to die for, topped by a million-year old Woolly Mammoth molar.

Ancient Artifacts.jpg

Unfortunately, my collection hasn't grown much in recent years, primarily because when you have one fossilized Megalodon tooth, you have them all. I still travel though, and recently got to play in the waves with my two-year old grandson, Felix, at the beach on St. Croix. Every time water would splash on his face, he would smile and laugh. A little local girl nearby noticed how much fun he was having and wanted to join in, so she reached under the water, pulled up a stone and threw it back in so that the splash amused Felix. Hey, I wanted to get involved in that action so I reached down into the sand under me, grasping around for something big enough to splash, but what I found felt strange so before throwing it back in, I looked a it: it was a rusted piece of iron. I thought about the ancient seafaring history of the ocean floor just beneath me; presumably, this was something off of a sunken ship. It was bizarre, not macabre, but I put it aside thinking it was a lucky find no matter what. Felix was still laughing away at the little girl's stones when I scrounged around in the sand for something else: this time it was the bottom of an old glass bottle so I set that aside too. On my third attempt, I tried to find a real stone but the thing I picked up didn't feel like a stone? I examined it closely, something about it looked familiar... Then I remembered from my Medical School anatomy lab: it was the distal end of a man's femur, complete with the articulating surface; and definitely qualifying as macabre. After that, I quit looking at the items I was tossing around for Felix to laugh at.

Artifacts.jpg