I buy a bowl

The Guardian article on Teotihuacan creates a a lot of low level noise on the internet.  An article on Slashdot generates over a hundred comments and probably hundreds of thousands of page views.

The statistician in me worries that even an outre hypothesis (e.g 1 in 10000) exposed to 100,000 people may result in someone else exploring the same idea and buying up any candidate precursor bowls that can be found on-line. Because I am eventually going to want to test candidate bowls for mercury residue, I don't want the risk of them all vanishing into unknown private hands.

I decide to buy one bowl online. The bowl pictured above is the one I choose. My reasoning is:

1. It's got a good functional feel, no decoration, bulbous legs and slots like the Met bowl.
2. It's a bit of a mess, definitely not a museum quality piece because the legs don't match. This reduces the chance it is an outright fake.
3. It's been it the USA for decades, so the ethical issues with buying artifacts are reduced. I figure I can give it back to the country of origin once I'm done (if the country can even be identified) for further ethical transgression minimization.
4. It's not too expensive.

This plan does not sit well with my wife. She's ok with, say, private ownership of a Crimea war Minie ball, but not with a nondescript classic Greek potshard. I'm in her immoral camp for pursuing this.

Here's another view of the bowl:

Note how the nubs on the other two legs are horizontal rather than vertical. And they have no slots. And the foot pads are substantially larger.