[Maurice]

Originally Posted by T. Koch

I’d like to share my new mandau with you all and if possible get some feedback as to the style of carving or anything else that you feel may be of value. I’ve recently focused my interest from the Asmat of New Guinea to Borneo, so I’m trying to learn as much as I possibly can about the cultural background of the Dayak peoples.

Let's try to answer some of your questions.
It's very difficult to tell something about the style of carvings etc as it can be very complex and there were a lot of different tribes (wether related to eachother or not).
The best thing to learn more about this is for instance to use the "search" function on "mandau" in this forum.
Some of the best mandaus had been discussed here in the past.
Besides that, reading old articles and visits to museums (and databases) are a great resource to learn more about mandaus (However the provenance/origin of the museumpieces aren't described very well often and sometimes even totally wrong, it's good to learn/study the old style as the date of collecting often is noted).
But beware digging deep into this matter.... it's very addictive.
Another source: http://www.ethnographicswords.com/

As there were many tribes in Borneo, it's not possible to unravel everything and to learn everything known in short time. Even the senior collectors amongst us have difficulties to nail down the exact tribe of mandaus which show up sometimes.

I've written a very general (not too long and technical) article about mandaus , which suits reading and studying perfectly for collectors who are trying to learn more about mandaus in general. However there's one problem....... I wrote it in Dutch and have no time (and not liking at the moment) to give it a proper translation into English......

Originally Posted by T. Koch

It was described by the seller as an Iban Mandau from the mid-20th century. Based on the pre-sale pictures I was a little nervous – particularly about the scabbard: In the pictures, the scabbard patina looked suspiciously like the standard “patina” that I’ve seen applied to “antique” Philipine tourist trinkets. Upon reception however, I was pleased to see that the scabbard has good patina and realistic signs of heavy wear. I now think the scabbard is at least from the same period if not original to the blade. It comes without both the small knife (ilang, right?) and belt attachment, however, as far as I know this is not unheard of concerning 20th century mandaus?

Mid 20th century would be very early to estimate your mandau, and probably (but that's my opinion) it's made more recently, and wouldn't go earlier as a few decades max. (judging the handle and the scabbard).
Both handle and scabbard don't raise the feeling to me of good patina and signs of wear.
The blade is another story. It looks older as the "dress". Maybe you can post an image of the decoration (if there is any) on the shoulder of the blade? (between the handle and the cutting edge of the blade).

Originally Posted by T. Koch

Although it is hard to see in the image, the spine of the blade is actually not straight, but slightly concave… This puzzles me a bit, as I thought that mandaus by definition had a straight spine, while only jimpuls have a curved one? If anybody could elaborate on this, I would be very grateful!

Not only jimpuls have curved blades. There are a lot of other Borneo swords (with different names) which have curved blades and are no jimpuls (search on jimpul in the database).
As a rule you can call a Borneo sword a mandau when it's concave at the innerside and convex at the outside (according specific tribes called "parang ilang", "malat" or "baieng").


Maurice