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Comment by malloci | Hacker News Reader

I always find it interesting that objects like these must have had to have a purpose. Why couldn’t it have been a piece of art simply for decoration?

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I can only imagine some archeologist looking at the Filipino giant spoon/fork hanging on our kitchen walls and wondering what it would be used for.

It's not like anyone actually writes down house decoration theory. You just sorta pick up on it based on visiting a bunch of people's homes in a community.

But it does have cultural significance. Filipino dishes are served with a fork and a spoon, not with a knife as is common in the west, or chopsticks as in some other Asian cultures. It is a very culturally specific thing, and something that hopefully is written somewhere. If not, maybe this little conversation will do the trick and be referenced ages from now

If they were art you’d expect them to be more different, and not as localized.

Because if you do art, you want to make something unique. Artists don't create exact replicas of the same object so often that a hundred of them are found over 1000 years later (which implies that there were probably many thousands of these).

This would suggest that the "cool S" that showed up in notebooks, on walls, etc. throughout my youth was a religious/ritual symbol. Same with stuffed squirrels and singing bass and "Bless This Mess" crochets and barn stars...

It merely suggest that those are not art.

And going back to the original question, making those dodecahedrons would have required considerable expense, skills, and effort. That's not the kind of thing that can spread as a low-effort fad, and an artist who's going to spend that much time on something would be even less likely to make an exact replica rather than something original.

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