[J Marcus]

Just couldn't resist:

http://cgi.ebay.com/SPECIAL-SUISEKI-...2em118Q2el1247


Marc

[pearlescence]

If I remember my O level geology it could be some sort of pudding stone - aptly named stone from when igneus rock flows over a pebble beach, for eg and the pebbled get mixed in. Or it is coloured concrete with stones added.

[Valeria101]

Everything can be faked, but this time, at least there is a good quantity of the natural equivalent out there. Not terribly popular and quite some quantity: I doubt anyone had a need to fake it.

If my hunch is right, then the balls are obsidian nodules in perlite. Something similar from the US is called 'Apache tears'. Usually the rounded black pebbles are extracted and appreciated for their own sake... the perlite is flaky and, well, perhaps just a different decorator's approach. So if you Google for 'evidence' you'd mostly find black, roundish pebbles. Not much material presented in the host rock, like THESE.

Obviously, the Chinese material is colored differently (just a detail), but the matrix seems to have been coated with a lacquer (see the different color in the holes from where the rounded pebbles fell off?), and this seems to support the hunch since the fragile perlite would definitely need some coating to stabilize it for handling.

There's a short story of how these things formed in Shinkakas, and sure enough, someone on Ganoskin cited it already HERE.


PS. I thought 'Puddinstone' is a conglomerate? Could be that we're talking of different things though...

[J Marcus]

What a strange coincidence! My grandfather and his two sisters owned some perlite claims in central Arizona and my great aunt and uncle worked the claims for some years early in the 1900's. I remember my mother telling me about it and describing the rotary kiln that they used to cook the material into commercial perlite. It's basically degraded obsidian and it has some chemically bonded water in it. When it gets hot enough to melt the obsidian the water turns to super-heated steam and it puffs it up like popcorn. I can remember one of my great aunts mixing up cement and perlite and casting blocks from it. I think that she was trying to come up with a building material that had some insulating properties. It was all sold off sometime in the middle '60's. I still have a bunch of the Apache Tears from the mine around here somewhere. Funny I should focus on that. I don't think that I ever saw the raw material or the mine. Thank you for sorting that one out, Valeria.

J Marcus
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