Attic finds get a back story at Burke Museum's Artifact ID Day

They lined up outside the Burke Museum on a blustery Saturday with strange and wondrous objects found in attics, garage sales and the dirt.

Earl Irish, 60, wanted to know if an oval stone he found in Olympia was a dinosaur-egg fossil.

Leo Church and his dad, Jon, wanted to know how to preserve North African knives and ancient Egyptian tomb relics passed down in their globe-trotting family.

And Eric Pond, 55, wanted to know more about the Native-American model canoe he found in his grandmother's attic.

For more than two decades, Artifact ID Day at Seattle's Burke Museum has offered surprises to curators and members of the public who bring in their treasures.

Unlike "Antiques Roadshow," the specialists can't authenticate or appraise artifacts.

But people love coming anyway. There's the spectacle of seeing other people's treasures. The joy of sharing an odd object only a curator could love. And the thrill of coming maybe a little closer to learning the story behind the artifact.

"This is from my grandma's attic," said Pond, showing a delicately painted model canoe to Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, an ethnologist. The foot-long wooden canoe, more than a century old, likely originated with Tlingit tribes in Southeast Alaska, she told him.

That clicked with Pond, who drove up from Vancouver, Wash. His great-grandfather, who migrated from the Midwest during the Yukon Gold Rush, spent some time in Alaska, Pond said.

"I've been using this to teach Boy Scouts how the Northwest people constructed their watercraft," he said.

Others didn't get the answers they hoped for.

A geologist told Irish that his oval stone was a concretion, a formation in sedimentary rock.

"They dashed my hopes," the Bellevue hobbyist said. "I still think it's an egg."

Bob Loveless, 58, of Shoreline, brought his grandson Kevin. He said the museum's specialists were stumped as to the origins of a stone projectile embedded in bison vertebrae.

For specialists like Bunn-Marcuse, that's often the case.

"It feels like this final exam. You don't know what's going to be on it," she said. But "I always look forward to this day. Sometimes something unbelievable walks in."

Unbelievable walked in around 3 p.m.

Bunn-Marcuse and Laura Phillips, the museum's archaeology collections manager, were amazed to be handling a "copper" brought in by a man who said he found it about a decade ago on his property near Vancouver Island. These metal pieces were shields made of copper and were signs of wealth and prestige among Northwest Native tribes. They were traded by chiefs and brought out for marriages and speeches.

"I'd encourage you to donate it to the tribe," Bunn-Marcuse said.

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com