[Lee]

Meandering into philosophical discussions can be quite enjoyable, even if my level of existential squelch does cause me to skip over a lot.

Those are wooden pegs holding the two halves of the scabbard together. There were also wooden pegs securing the end of the scabbard, but one is absent and the other broken (and the rubber band that has usurped their purpose was removed for the photographs).

The scabbard is made of relatively soft wood and it is bulkier than many of the kris scabbards I have encountered. The photographs are not optimal for showing a glued repair of the mouthpiece on one side and several cracks on the opposite side in the same area. Would this scabbard have stood up to a generation of regular use - I seriously doubt it. I even wonder if this was made as a 'resting' scabbard.

While blades remain useful in a society as weapons or social status indicators, they are going to get remounted and passed around, especially if they are perceived as being of superior quality. The book I linked to above delves into the effects of this in Late Iron Age Finland and how this natural activity makes retrospective assignments and recognition of style trends difficult to impossible to discern. Whether by trade or conquest, good blades did 'get around' when they were relevant as they do today for our purposes of collectors. As collectors, we usually strive to maintain rather than change the objects. But if you were going to wear a sword in earnest every day it would likely find itself remounted to your taste. So, I think that any sword that remained in use for multiple generations may have seen re-mountings along the way both for structure and style. My favorite example of such is in the Swiss National Museum in Zurich where a pattern-welded Migration Period blade has been later mounted as a Katzbalger - now all phases are in good but 'excavated' condition.

The photographs of this sword were also not taken to show old combat edge damage, but there are some 'V' profile cuts just back from the tip that suggest this sword did see some practical physical use.

As to the semantics, I suppose auction and museum catalogers have worked this out. The sword formerly in the logo (removed in posthumous deference to Matchlock) could be accurately classified as 'takouba sword with silver mountings in Agadez style, late 20th to early 21st century, with an earlier (17th or early 18th century) European trade blade.' Here we give precedence to the whole in its current state.

Or one can go the other way around: 'tachi sword blade, Yamato Tegai school, inscribed Kanenaga, late 13th to early 14th century, in mixed later mounts' where the focus is just on the blade.

But to our current point, if this started out as Maranao, there is no reason that a Maguindanao might not have taken a fancy to this blade (as did I) and acquired it and remounted it to suit himself (as I have not).