Here’s really wild speculation about how they could be used as a ritual object: what if they are an ancient version of a Chladni plate support? The dodecahedron rests on a flat surface, a plate with sand rests on top, and you can somehow make strong enough vibrations using a musical instrument to create patterns in the sand? The exact patterns would vary depending on which face is up.
It might explain the choice of material, as well as lack of standardization. The most important thing about the different faces is that they are different, not necessarily standardized. It could explain the knobs/feet – you’d want as much of the shape to be free to vibrate as possible.
If something like this were the case, you’d expect to find some plates, too (and I would supposed they’d be metal for acoustic reasons). Also there would be an association with music making equipment.
We don’t, as far as I know no flat plates have been found with any of the ones found in situ.
That’s leaving aside that there’s absolutely zero evidence the Romans were aware of acoustics or Chladni figures. And they didn’t have bowed musical instruments so the usual method of producing the figures wouldn’t have worked.
I was once Props Master for a Shakespeare Ensemble. Getting chainmail for armor was virtually impossible (even if we could have afforded the “knitted” kind you see at RenFaires and Conventions, there weren’t enough people back then making them. And forget about real chain mail). So we used knitted shirts. And, to increase the resemblance to chain mail we got wax that had been mixed with aluminum powder and lightly rubbed this across the coarse weave. This left the top layer of “rings” coated with metallic silvery stuff, and made a pretty decent substitute.
I had no idea that the use of knitted shirts in Monty Python was “well known”.
Any support for the theory that Monty Python and the Holy Grail actually takes place in 20th century Britain, and “King Arthur”, his “knights” and many of the people they encounter are nothing but a bunch of loonies?
BTW, this sound effect is hilariously effective. I cut up a couple of coconuts for my scouts to use in an Old West themed skit, and you could hear them clip clopping from 100 feet away.
Printing ‘loose’ parts in metal this way is pretty challenging. When the ‘brown’ part is sintered, any of the individual metal pieces that are in contact with one another will join to ether other with a bond that has the same strength as ‘parent’ material. You can see with the plastic parts that the operator is having to pull away the support material and pull the layers of links from each other which is easy enough to do with PLA, TPU, or polypropylene (especially when it is still warm and not cured) but would be nearly impossible to do by hand with any structural metal and you’d probably see a lot of damage if you could.
Which is strange because anyone with a passing knowledge of British history knows that Arthur was supposedly king of the Britons, before the Anglo-Saxon invasions circa fifth century A.D. Of course the introduction is a potpourri of Briton, Anglo-Saxon and Norman history, perhaps deliberately. Maybe they should have thrown in a lost Roman or two.
The argument against this, for me, is their particular uniqueness. If they have “no particular utility value beyond ornament”, I expect to see cubes with knobs, for example, or pyramids.
Take the comparison to Funko-Pops, for example. Those have defining characteristics (small, square heads, basically ornaments) but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of similar but different types of figurines. There’s nothing that I can think of that is equivalent, but different, to the dodecahedrons.
Yeah, for a while, I was considering making myself a suit of chainmail (or at least, something resembling it: I had an idea for how to make a reasonable facsimile that’d be much easier than thousands of individual links), but some quick calculations showed the weight to be much more than I’d have wanted to wear.
There is an image going around on Reddit and Facebook with the following caption: A gold necklace discovered in Hepu Han Dynasty cemetery. 206 BCE-220 CE, now housed at the Hepu Han Dynasty Cultural Museum in China.
I have not yet found an actual cite that confirms this. A dig may have taken place in 2022. The style of the dodecahedral beads and the early end of the alleged 206 BCE to 220 CE date range would be consistent with the gold beads discussed upthread which were found at archaeological sites in Thailand and Vietnam.
The museum describes the beads as “olive and flower balls”.
I’ll suggest that rather little wooden anything would survive intact from Roman days to the present. The absence of wooden [whatevers] today says very little about whether there were or were not wooden [whatevers] way back then.
