[meteorite-list] Gibeon Anvil Full Slices, first time ever on the market

Tue Aug 7 18:39:22 EDT 2012

Hello List,

I am excited to announce that I now have available, for a very limited 
time, a few full slices from a 51kg Gibeon meteorite that was used as 
an anvil, possibly for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. 

Amazingly rare, historically significant, and way off the "Wow Chart!"

Gibeon is one of the largest strewnfields in the world, with hundreds 
of large and thousands of smaller sizes specimens found since science 
"discovered" it in 1836.  However, it is impossible to know how many 
tons of this meteorite had been found and used for millennia before 
1836 by the natives in and around the huge Gibeon Strewnfield.  It 
makes perfect sense that as people would find hunks of iron laying 
around, that they would take hammer sized pieces, and make hammers out 
of them, and take anvil sized pieces, and make anvils out of them and 
take smaller sized pieces and forge tools such as hoes, scrapers, 
knives, and spear points etc., out of those.

Until now, I am an not aware that any meteorite from Gibeon specimens 
to have shown any definite traces of being altered due to being 
hammered upon while being used as an anvil.   Smaller pieces forged 
into thinner tools likely would have rusted away after a few hundred 
years in the elements, so it is not expected that many of them could 
have survived to modern times.

We have seen slices of iron meteorites that show where the 
Widmanstatten lines have been bent and distorted due to tearing apart 
of pieces in flight, possibly even by astroidial collisions in space.  
But those have their bends going only in one direction.

In the August 2012 issue of Meteorite Magazine, my wife Qynne has 
authored a story about how we acquired this piece and the slightly 
tragic events that unfolded in me discovering that it wasn't just an 
"ordinary" Gibeon, but rather that it was indeed an extra-ordinary 
one.  I don't want to ruin your reading in the issue, but I will say 
that after I saw that the Widmanstatten Structure was tremendously 
bent, not just in one direction, but in four directions, I knew this 
was altered by man.  (Picture a square square being hammered on it's 
edges to the point the slices looked like the cross section of a 
hamburger and bun instead, folded down on both sides of the top and 
folded up on both sides of the bottom, and you will start to appreciate 
how this rock was distorted as both the top and bottom surfaces had 
been flattened and rounded in relentless poundings).   I realized that 
it had indeed been hit, no doubt hundreds of thousands of times to 
artificially shape it, and to distort the normally straight 
Widmanstatten lines into amazingly curved ones. 

I originally chopped about 1/4 of an end piece off the mass, before 
discovering the evidence that this was an anvil.  I immediately 
contacted curators of the major collections, both institutional and 
private, to see if any of them were interested in trading some "normal 
Gibeon" (or other specimens) for either 1/4, or 3/4 or both pieces of 
an anvil?   There was no expressed interest, so I decided to turn the 
cutting over to a pro, and let Marlin Cilz slice the end piece into 19 
slices and a smaller end piece.

Marlin ran into some challenges on etching the slices, as it seems 
evident that the mass was artificially heated.  Not heated to the point 
that all the pattern was lost completely, only that the pattern is 
faded, so that unlike the normal pattern one usually sees in Gibeon 
slices, where it is sharp and crisp, and where it "pops" very clearly 
and quickly when etched in acid, the etching took quite a long time to 
allow a much deeper etch to reveal the contorted lines in an 
appreciable visible state.  I had Marlin send most of the slices back 
to me unetched so I could test various methods of etching to see what 
would show off this very special alteration the best. 

Various methods and various times in the solutions produced different 
looks and different results.  All of which were hard to capture in 
photographs, and yet when holding the slices in your hands, allowing 
some light to strike the raised bands while other light hitting the 
deeper etched surfaces made for really amazing slices to behold.   
Meanwhile, not all the testing resulted in ideal results.  Sometimes a 
slice would get over etched.  Other times the acid neutralizer would 
work too much and seem to "stain" the what should have been a nicely 
finished slice.  Other times, the etching acid would not immediately 
get neutralized and some would leach out  from the "cavities" of the 
squished regmaglipts on the sides that had long ago been hammered 
shut.  Neutralizing that hidden acid later would stop the etching, but 
not until after the darker stains would have set in the surface of the 
slice.  This would require the slice to be completely sanded down and 
the whole process to be started all over again.

During all of this, I am wrestling with what to price this material 
at? 

Price it too high, and no one will buy it. Price it to low, and I will 
quickly sell out, only to have the savvy buyers resell it  (to those 
not at the sale early enough) for higher prices more in line with what 
the market really thinks it is worth.    I could offer the first slice 
at auction, and hope a very high price is set, then hope I can move the 
other 18 at the same, or close to the same, price.  But that could be 
problematic if one or two sell high, and no one else thinks any of the 
others are worth it at those prices.

These slices range from 163.1 grams up to 459.7 grams, but each full 
slice really tells the exact SAME story.  Yes, some are slightly wider, 
and some are slightly thicker than others.  Some are a bit different in 
their aesthetic characteristics, but remarkably, they are all very 
similar.  20 years from now, when you see one of these slices in a 
museum, or in someone's private collection, you will instantly be able 
to recognize it as to what it is, if you take just a minute now to 
examine one or more of the sets of photos from  these slices.  So, 
really, what difference is there between a 163g full slice and a 459g 
full slice?  Not much, except one is quite a bit thicker, and one is a 
bit taller and wider than the other.  To the viewer of those two 
slices, there is the same "Wow Factor"

Therefore, I decided it was wrong to price these by the gram.  All the 
slices, in my mind at least, are worth the same.  They all tell the 
same story.

However, I want to be fair and base the prices on these to some extent 
on what the other 99.99999999999% of "Non-Anvil Gibeon" slices out 
there are priced at.  Gibeon sells pretty easily up over the $1/g range 
today.  Ebay has slices sell at the $1.25/g to $2.00/g range day in and 
day out.  Sometimes a tad higher, sometimes a tad lower.  So, a very 
limited number of slices, from a one in a million specimen could 
probably be justified at 4 to 5 times the base rate.  Some might argue 
that it is worth 10 times as much.  Some might say that "rare" irons 
 from other 51kg TKW masses that we see selling now on the market at $20 
per gram might be the right bench mark to set this at.  With the 
historical implications, could one justify something near the $100/g 
that other meteorites sell at that have distinct ties with people in 
historical situations.

I just don't know what it is worth!  One day, we might be seeing this 
sell in the $10/g or $20/g or $100/g range, who knows?  I think it is 
safe to say it is worth at LEAST $1.25 to $2.00/g at a bare minimum.  
If I trade off the large uncut portion, and most of these slices end up 
in collections where the owners don't want to let them go, where will 
someone down the road go to get more of them?  It could take a person 
1,000 years, of daily pounding, with a sledge hammer, to get a similar 
51 kilo rock to end up looking like this one.  Even at minimum wage, 
that would cost a LOT to make more of these once these sell out.

Just the other day, a very famous Damascus Steel knife maker walked 
into my Meteorite Store in Eureka Springs, and we struck up a very 
interesting conversation.  As you might guess, the conversation 
eventually turned to the Anvil and the slices that I was at various 
degrees of preparation with, you could see the spark in his eye light 
up.   I can't make any promises at this point, but don't be surprised 
if a few of these slices end up being the contributing material in a 
very exclusive set of Anvil Meteorite Damascus Knives.   He asked about 
the prices of the slices, and I had told him I had not settled in on a 
price yet, but had told him what I kind of thought they were worth and 
he scoffed.  Not because he thought the price was too high, but that 
because he regularly sells a completed knife for much more than that, 
and that possibly we should consider making 19 knives, and use a little 
bit from each full slice to make each knife, and then bundle the almost 
full slice in a package deal with the knife that is made from the piece 
as a set.   We could use the other uncut part of the mass to actually 
hammer the knives out on, at least long enough for the photo op!  The 
temptation to totally forget taking these to the meteorite community 
altogether was inviting.   After talking with him, I get the feeling 
there might be more knife collectors out there in the world than there 
are meteorite collectors.  If that is the case, maybe these are worth a 
lot more than I think they are. 

Meanwhile, I do want to sell some slices in the short term.  I want to 
raise some money.  My daughter is getting married in just over a month, 
and as such I have some bills to pay.  And besides, I think I owe it to 
meteorite community to offer at least a few of these to them.

So, I have decided to price ALL 19 slices at a flat price of $900 
each. 

So, if you want the biggest slice at 459.7 grams, that would be a price 
of  $1.95/g.

So, if you want the smallest slice at 163.1 grams, that would be a 
price of $5.52/g.

The 10 largest being over 316 grams, which is just $2.85/g.

Honestly, I think that is a bargain even at the $5.52/g.

Stop an think about it...how many people probably used this Anvil to 
SIGNIFICANTLY improve their and their neighbor's lives out on the 
Savannah of Africa?  And while there is no way to know when it was 
actually used, one's imagination can easily picture that possibly long 
before "civilized culture" reached their "Iron Age" in other parts of 
the world, there was a pocket of people within the Gibeon Strewnfield 
richly enjoying prosperity above anyone else on the planet, because of 
this amazing gift of iron from the heavens.  And for less than a 
thousand bucks, you can own and hold one of only 19 slices of this 
amazing  tool that, no question about it, altered hundreds if not 
thousands of lives, all  for the better!

Wow.  After proofreading that last paragraph, maybe I should ask $2,000 
per slice?

Seriously, this is off the charts on the "Wow Factor."   Place one of 
these slices into someone's hands, and they just might have a religious 
experience.

I will promise to offer at least 10 of the 19 slices for sale for $900 
each for the next week.  I do want to reserve the right to hold at 
least 9 aside (I am assuming they will be the smaller slices, but I 
will let the buyers decide on a first come first served basis) until 
the details of the knife deal are figured out.

SPECIAL NOTE:  Not all of the slices are finished to perfection.  Some 
of the slices have been finished with some glaring blemishes.  Brown 
stains on some, poor etching, leaving not the best looking etch on 
others.   I had two choices:  1. Offer only some that are ready to sell 
now, but not all, then offer the others later when they are ready.   
Or: 2. Wait until all of them were done to the best possible conclusion 
THEN put them all up to be sold at the same time.

If I was offering these at a price per gram, maybe the the first option 
would have been a better option.  But since I am offering them all at 
the same price, I didn't want to not show people what all of them 
looked like, holding some out of the listing, only to later introduce 
more and possibly make early buyers mad if they think a better slice 
comes out later and they didn't get a shot at it.

So, PLEASE UNDERSTAND, some of the slices should be refinished, and I 
am willing to work on them to finish them to the best of my ability at 
no extra charge.  Also understand, that if the process of "finishing" 
or in some cases "refinishing" them may require sanding and as such 
their weight might decrease a fraction of a bit.  Also, I personally 
find a tad bit of the browning of the "over etching" kind of nice, as 
it adds some color for contrasting in the deeper etch.  No, it isn't 
always super sharp silver and chrome and white-grey like a Rolex Gibeon 
Watch Face, but damn it lets you see the bent lines pop out on the 
surface!   I guess to each his own...besides, the real clean sharp etch 
is NOT possible with these slices as the mass was artificially heated 
at least to some degree.

And of course, if you have any personal experience in etching, as I 
know a lot of you do, you might feel free to tackle the project of 
playing with this on your own to personally reach the aesthetic ideal 
you like yourself.  If that is the case, buy them as is, and go for it!

In any case, I am convinced all these blemishes will clean up, as they 
did in the many of the other slices, it will just take time to rework 
them.

I have put up multiple photos of all the slices in their current state 
as of 8/6/2012 up on photobucket.   As time allows, I might refinish 
one slice at a time and replace the "old" photos with new ones and 
adjust the weight as may be needed.

NOTE ABOUT THE PHOTOS:   Some slices took better photos than others.  
Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised at how nice some of the photos 
came out, as it was hard to tell at the time of taking them.  Others 
turned out not so nice.   Some slices are stained or have a poor etch, 
or the photos in some areas just came out not so good.  Each slice is 
numbered in order, so if you like something about one particular slice, 
but if there is something you do NOT like about it, I invite you to 
look at both slices on either side of it.  Odds are REAL GOOD that the 
same characteristics can be found in the slice you like as the 
neighbors, even if you can't see those characteristics in the one you 
are zeroing in on.  Maybe a better polish, or better etch, or better 
photo will do those characteristics more justice next time around. 

If you really like a slice, but want better or different photos take of 
it, let me know, and I can work at playing with other light options to 
make them look the best I can.

Again, when you hold all of these in your hand, and slowly rotate them 
where the light bounces just right off of the surface, they are nothing 
short of amazing.

You can see the slices at Photobucket here:

http://s361.photobucket.com/albums/oo52/stevearnoldpmh/Gibeon%20Anvil%20Slices/

As always, first come first served.  Questions welcomed.  Paypal is 
preferred, but I can take credit cards over the phone and checks 
through the mail. But be sure to reserve your slice before you pay.

After cash sales are made in the first week, I may be open to 
entertaining some trades, but I might be a tad stingy on value because 
I really think these "retail" prices are VERY reasonable compared to 
many other so called "retail" prices some put on other meteorites.  But 
if you have no cash, but have trade material, and are interested, at 
least let me know so I can get back with you shortly.

Expect the largest slices to sell first.

The very small end piece and the large main mass are for sale, and if 
interested, please contact me at:   MeteorHntr at aol.com

Steve Arnold
Host of Science Channel's TV Series Meteorite Men
       www.ScienceChannel.com
President Palladot Inc, Extra-terrestrial Gemstones
       www.Palladot.com
Co-Founder Meteorite Cards, hot new collectible trading cards
       www.MeteoriteCards.com
Facebook:  MeteoriteMan  
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meteorhntr at aol.com