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"It's an exceptional object," said Joseph Ackley '03 from Southbury, Conn, "but one that raises myriad questions about its origins, how it was made, and its intended function."
Ackley and Bart Thurber, the Hood Museum's Curator of European Art, worked together to fill in the gaps of our knowledge about this piece.
After testing the sculpture's core, Thurber learned that it is 1,400 to 2,200 years old. Knowing that people of the ancient Mediterranean produced small bronze animal statuettes at that time, Thurber and Ackley want to determine where exactly it was made and what it was used for.
Here the mystery deepens as they can't find any existing examples of bronze statuettes of the same size; the vast majority are smaller. Also, the sculpture's composition is distinctive. There are trace elements in the bronze, such as arsenic and bismuth, that don't match the typical quantities found in most other bronze pieces of that time and locale. One theory is that the bronze was recycled, since the metal was so valuable. As for its function, it's anybody's guess.
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