Degradation of important keris over time

[David]

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

I would liken this situation as being on the outside of a house with many rooms, we can wander around the house and look in through the windows, and at any one time, in any one room, we can see people doing things and hear them discussing things, but what we see and hear lacks an overall consistency, depending upon what time of day it might be and what window we are looking through.

Now, if we are fortunate enough to find an open door that permits us to enter one of these rooms, we might be able to engage with some of the people in the room, and when we do, we might find that what we thought we understood when we were standing outside looking in through the window, was not at all relevant to the ideas of the inhabitants of that room.

This seems like a very good analogy Alan.
Milandro, while i see why Jag's questions brought up the concept of river finds and digging up keris with metal detectors, i believe this is a bit of a tangent from Jag's original questions. But like you i also am very skeptical of what seems like an awful lot of river finds of keris and can see why you suspect this is a bit of a cottage industry for some in Indonesia. There seems to be a entire collecting community within the larger keris spectrum that is very focussed on specifically collecting supposedly ancient and degraded keris pulled up from river bottoms. I tend to look at the whole thing with a rather large grain of salt, as they say. Some may be valid finds. Others maybe not. Personally though i prefer a keris that is not is relic condition regardless of the possibility of ancient origin.