Created by Nature - Made by Man

	Petrified Wood Table; Java, Indonesia; 33 W x 19 D x 26 H inches; I.D. # F1406-028

It is 107 degrees Fahrenheit deep in the Javanese forest. Humidity is off the charts. You are working at an excavation site and the clothes you are wearing are so laden with sweat it feels like you are in body armor. This place is not exactly hospitable. In your hand is a pick-axe.  A brush and trowel are in your back pocket and other archaeology tools lay nearby; except you are not at an archaeological dig. Beneath the surface is a coniferous forest – now petrified - blown apart 330 million years ago when this area was nothing but volcanoes and trees. So prevalent here, petrified wood is considered a natural resource; yet so difficult to access, it is nothing less than buried treasure.

Petrified Wood Table was part of a larger tree trunk before it was converted to a form of functional art; I.D. # F1406-028

This week’s New Arrival features a petrified wood table. Once part of a tree trunk, it was buried in the ground after the eruption of an unknown volcano when Indonesia was part of a giant land mass known as Pangaea. In the amount of time it took for this piece to petrify, Pangaea shattered to become the modern continents, the earth cooled and reheated multiple times, mass extinctions came and went, and the road to humanity was yet to be paved. In fact, this wood petrified long before our ancestors ever took their first upright steps, a ridiculously short 200,000 years ago. Yet, it took human ingenuity only a moment to discover how nature crystallizes wood, and how this treasure could be converted into collectible, functional art.