Arsenic or realgar for Keris etching?

[David]

Originally Posted by kulbuntet

And about tangguh. Yes it's normal for a collector to want to index their pieces, and give a label how old the blade is... as we do on every thing in normal life too. With the keris it's sometimes for comercial value sometimes just to want to know... depends on the person.

I would agree that it is fairly normal collector behavior to want to know certain specifics about our collections including an idea of the age. I know that i always want to know that. I would like to suggest though that the "age" of a keris is not necessarily the "tangguh" of a keris. The tangguh might suggest an age and age might suggest a tangguh, but i do not believe they are exactly the same thing.
I would say that it probably is quite possible for knowledgeable people to estimate the age of a keris when held in hand because they can see the wear, feel the weight, feel the surfaces and compare style and materials with other keris that may come from the same time period. If they understand the pakem of the day and what was being presented as "correct" keris form at the time they can judge if the blade meets the standard of that particular kingdom. But is a poorly made village keris made in the late Mataram kingdom considered to be of that tangguh or simply in it if it doesn't meet the criteria and standard for keris of the day? The concept of tangguh was not created for such keris, was it?
The problem with using tangguh methods to judge the age of some keris is that the inticators for a particular tangguh may not exist in a poorly made village piece or the smith might be might have been working a a style that was out of mode for that tangguh. Even judging by materials used can be tricky. What if the keris was made from older keris? Then how do you date the metal type. In later years many keris are made from old material.
Unless we have some incredible luck with provenance for a keris we will never know the exact date of any keris. Often an expert can put a proper keris in it's proper tangguh, but often those tangguhs span a century or two. On some really high quality empu made keris where there are many known and specific inticators of that empus work someone might be able to narrow an origin down to the working life that specific empu. But this doesn't happen very often, i don't believe.
So with some of these village keris, if you are really lucky you might place it within a couple of hundred years, maybe put it in a century, and yes that is a range that the collector might be able to go with. But is it tangguh?