[quote:="Travel Room"]Anyone have any ideas if this object is real or not and/or where it is from? I saw a show on the Discovery/OLN station ( If I recall correctly, it represented the Salomon Islands? Samoan?), that showed a tribe that chiseled morphed stone heads much like this to strike fear into wandering neighboring tribes. I appreciate any input you may have, cheers.

http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff188/TravelRoom/Stonerelic6.jpg
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff188/TravelRoom/Stonerelic3.jpg
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff188/TravelRoom/Stonerelic4.jpg

Wish I could help you on the ID, but I have no idea. Where did you find it?

Very cool looking piece! 8-)

I picked it up at a swap meet (Flea Market) in Hawaii about ten years ago.

It's a "heebiejeebie" made out of cooled volcanic lava or some other porphyritic material. Where did you get this thing? Do you have any provenience or contextual information/data, or did you pick this up at a flea market, auction, etc.?

Just in case you are wondering, "heebiejeebie" is a word I picked up in my childhood. I had relatives who read the word definition pages in Reader's Digest. Back in the 1960s, one of the subject words was "heebiejeebie." Of course, the word means to be nervous or jittery. Yeah, it's actually in the dictionary. However, playing off the likelihood that some ancient sculptures or effigies have had highly negative cultural connotations (see Voodoo), an aunt of mine (my mother's sister actually) chose to begin referring to such artifacts as heebiejeebies. You will recall the little effigy figurine found by the archaeologist in the Sumerian sands at the beginning of "The Exorcist." Yep, that was a heebiejeebie!!! After watching that movie, how could one say otherwise? Informally, I call all effigy figurines, and isolated parts thereof, heebiejeebies. Think we could start an informal archaeology-wide tradition here?

Since it came from Hawaii - your best chance at getting an ID is to contact archaeologists working there. Try the Society for Hawaiin archaeology http://www.sha.hawaii.edu/ ; the Hawai'i Archaeological Research Project http://www.anthropology.hawaii.edu/projects/HARP/ or the State Historic Preservation Division http://www.hawaii.gov/dlnr/hpd/index.htm . Hopefully one of them should be able to help out. Let us know what you find.

DM