Titanium in kerises - so what?

[A. G. Maisey]

No, I don't think so. I really doubt that it would make any difference at all, either for or against the quality of the material, because the amounts of titanium involved are so minute, just trace elements really. There are many other factors involved in primitive forge technology that can affect the qualities of the finished product, apart from titanium.Additionally, the range of acceptable quality for intended purpose is so wide with a keris, that there is a huge span of acceptable material.

As for spectrographic analysis, well, it might be an interesting way to pass some time, but the great Polish historical metallurgist Prof. Jerzy Piaskowski spent years and years on analysis of the material used in keris, so a lot of this sort of work has already been done.

As for correlation of garap with material,and visually perceived quality of material, if you have sufficient genuinely old keris of quality to constitute a statistically valid sample, this might be a useful exercise.