That's the tricky thing about isolated finds. You can't know their history.

Recently I found an evening gown from the late 1950s/early 1960s at our local thrift store. It was filthy, so I took it home and carefully cleaned it. And now? It is gorgeous. There's no label, but the workmanship is superb. It falls within the lines of what Chanel was doing at the time.

Could I call it Chanel?

No. It has no provenance, other than someone donated it. I live near Los Angeles; many industry professionals live around here, including the light decorator down the street. Could this be a costume from a film of that time? Possibly, though film-worn things usually have little labels sewn in them to help the costume dragons stay calm. It still might have been in a cheap film, or had the label removed.

So I have a fantastic pink beaded dress, in a stylish cut, that I cannot accurately assign to a designer, film or anything else. If I could, its value would shoot up to the thousands of dollars. As it is, it's got to stand on its own merit.

And that's what happens when someone brings in this nifty thing they found. You go back to the little patch in the field, but don't find anything else. Was it discarded by someone passing through? Ritually left as a kind of offering? Dumped there as old-fashioned and useless? We can't know. We don't know who left it, and that hurts its value. Not monetary, but intellectual. Divorced from its original context, it has to stand on its own merit.

So our oddly-marked bowl has to stand as it is, a relic of a time gone, but one unable to say much more than that.

And that's frustrating as hell.