My dealer brought this item (along with suspiciously done Ming Blue & White plates) just today. He left them for my perusal since I was not at home. This is not yet paid for but I'll still post it, just in case the deal won't fall through.
This I believe is a funerary ceramic or pottery, bull or ox in form, which when struck gives of a metallic sound (high firing temperature?), and looks very well made considering the creative output of precolonial natives in the Philippines. Though I wouldn't discount a local potter, I suspect this would be from the Tang or even Han dynasty. I could very well be wrong. Or maybe this was included with the trade ceramics brought over from Dvaravati empire in modern day Thailand.
Although the item has been repaired by a local restorer, it maintains its luster of being a rare and collectible piece of precolonial ceramic.
Perhaps a fake? Maybe. I'll try to get this for cheap since the guy would probably try to convince me that this is the rarest artifact from the Philippine Iron Age. It has the craftsmanship of an artisan, but executed for a more utilitarian reason. No glaze. Was this for the children of the datus or merely a cheap decor of the time?
Sometimes, I just wish there are more local Philippine books on the matter. Then again, the probable reason why we don't have many scholarly treatises on Filipino archaeology is because the sites are already damaged, looted and destroyed by the time experts arrive on the field similar to Egyptian tombs. Who's to blame but the pressures of economics and the lust for the rare. And I'm sure those who are in the corridors of power are themselves avid collectors of such ceramics.
Nonetheless, without knowledge, we tend to give in to the Fates. So, to buy or not to buy?
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