Question about black mandau

[David]

Others have addressed other aspects of your post, but not your remarks about meteorite.
Firstly, if Dayaks used meteorite in their blades (which i am not aware of), it would not be in amounts large enough to forge an entire blade from it. Firstly meteorites are rare to begin with. Iron bearing meteorites are even rarer and the right meteorite that lends itself to forging rarer still. You do not find meteorite steel. Steel is an alloy of iron with carbon. Iron bearing meteorites would probably appear black, but they would not remain so when you forge them. So there is no reason why a black blade would be a sign of steel made from meteorite. I am not aware of Dayaks traditionally darkening their blades, but this may well have been done by a collector outside the culture who hoped to show off the lamination of this blade by etching it with some sort of warangan substance.

[ariel]

In a Russian book by the doyen of Russian bladesmiths and damascus steel makers Mr. Arkhangelsky, he describes his attempts to forge a blade from a meteorite. It crumbled almost immediately, and things did not get better with multiple attempts to modify forging condition. Eventually, he had to take garden variety steel and add minute fragments of meteorite. AFAIK, Javanese smiths used tiny amounts of meteorite from Prambahan for their most valuable krises.

[Godfried]

Originally Posted by David

Others have addressed other aspects of your post, but not your remarks about meteorite.
Firstly, if Dayaks used meteorite in their blades (which i am not aware of), it would not be in amounts large enough to forge an entire blade from it. Firstly meteorites are rare to begin with. Iron bearing meteorites are even rarer and the right meteorite that lends itself to forging rarer still. You do not find meteorite steel. Steel is an alloy of iron with carbon. Iron bearing meteorites would probably appear black, but they would not remain so when you forge them. So there is no reason why a black blade would be a sign of steel made from meteorite. I am not aware of Dayaks traditionally darkening their blades, but this may well have been done by a collector outside the culture who hoped to show off the lamination of this blade by etching it with some sort of warangan substance.

I thought of meteorite steel because the book of "the pagantribes of Borneo Volume 1" by Charles Hose on page 194 states that "thirty years ago nearly all the iron worked by the tribes of the interior was from ore found in the river beds and possibly from masses of meteoric iron "
But as I already noted, I think that after reading the posts, nijn mandau is just white steel and then blackened.
Whether this was done by dayaks or by a collector will never be known.
I do want to mention that A.Hendriks remarked in 1842 that the "doessonsch iron" is divided into 2 types. "bassie-hitam" black iron and "bassie-wadja" steel iron.