Jawa Keris for ID

[A. G. Maisey]

Obviously I could not.

Over time the differences in appearance soaked in & it became second nature to know, or more likely to feel, what I was looking at.

Music again:- how can we listen to and repeat a piece of music if we are not familiar with music?

There are various scales in music:-

https://pulse.berklee.edu/scales/index.html

it can be a little bit amusing to listen to somebody who is not familiar with pentatonic scales trying to hum a tune that is expressed in a pentatonic scale. That person might have been listening to music in chromatic scales from birth, but his ear is just not attuned to the different sounds of the pentatonic, so he often has difficulty in trying to repeat what he has heard, or rather what he thinks he has heard.

I probably should add a comment on the various types of ivory.

I am not an ivory expert & that is the reason I refer to "marine ivory" rather than "whale tooth". There is also walrus ivory that is sometimes used in keris hilts, apparently it found its way into SE Asia through the hands of whalers, as did also whale tooth, but throughout the Archipelago the indigenous people also hunted whales, or sometimes a whale would beach itself, & the people who lived nearby would take parts of the whale for use.

Then we have vegetable ivory, tagua nuts, but these are not nearly big enough to carve a hilt from, although they are sometimes big enough for small components such as a buntut or a pommel. If I were to be given a small piece of marine ivory & a small piece of tagua nut, I could not tell one from the other, but I could probably differentiate both from a small piece of elephant ivory, especially so if schreger lines were present.

[David]

Not sure your really need any more info here, so i am just chiming in to say that like Alan i like this keris.
I also agree with Alan that i would not change this hilt and also agree that it is marine ivory of some sort. One way of telling it is not elephant ivory is that elephant will usually display Schreger lines and i do not see any here. I have posted an image that shows what these Schreger lines look like.
One thing for sure, the hilt certainly is not wood.
While it is not really possible to tell for sure just from a photograph, it does appear that the "selut" is indeed silver. The motifs are unfamiliar to me though.

[Rick]

This is Tagua nut. I purchased this in a little village in the Darien some years ago.
These are pictured at about 2x magnification.
Now, if only we could genetically modify the plant to produce nuts of a suitable size maybe it would put a dent in the ivory trade.

[A. G. Maisey]

I had heard about vegetable ivory a long time before I understood what it was or saw any, then in the 1980's exquisite little Chinese or Japanese carvings began to appear in (mostly) jewellers' shops in Sydney, I bought a couple, but they were expensive.

In the 1990's --- I think --- somebody must have dumped a container load of tagua nuts in Bali and the Balinese outcarved any of the carvings I had seen in Sydney. The market was flooded in Bali. The prices hit rock bottom. I bought a lot.

At the moment these are packed away because of house repairs, when they come out of the bubble wrap I'll post some pics.

[Rick]

Tagua was also used to make shirt buttons; most likely replaced by a synthetic these days.

[A. G. Maisey]

Never knew that.