Hello Thor,
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I'm duly aware that the interstitial zone of hippo tusks sometimes produce dark inclusions along the lateral margins, but similar "spots in a row" can be found in other types of ivory: The inner cementum of walrus or longitudinally along deep age cracks in tusks of the proboscids, for example.
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Do you have any pics of such examples? The mottled areas of walrus make it usually less difficult to spot if the pieces are of reasonable size; while I have also seen spots with elephant, these seemed much less regularly distributed compared to hippo.
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I was just hoping that maybe you had an academic reference up your sleeve to tie them to the hippo.
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Thanks for the reminder - still need to search my wide sleeves...
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In general I think one should exercise care in assigning a source species to any ivory based on one character alone. -this goes x10 when we're doing it from photographs of course.
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D'accord.
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I can recommend the article "Unusual appearance of Schreger-like pattern in Hippopotamus amphibius ivory" (Simms, 2010). -I don't agree with their conclusions, but their findings illustrate this point very well.
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Here's the
link !
Regards,
Kai