[kitchen]

Seeing that slab raises a question: have you come across any advances in determining the procedures the Greeks used to soften and peel ivory into large sheets which were then formed into pieces to clad monolithic statuary, viz. Zeus at Olympia?

[SunkenCiv]

None of those statues have survived, even in part, which is too bad, really. I suspect that fragments of the bronze Colossus of Rhodes may still be found on the sea floor, although those have indeed been looked for. Apparently there’s a fairly current effort (again) to build a new C of R.

My wild guess is, the use of ivory on the large statues was limited, and a faux ivory made by some chemical process was used.

http://www.geopolymer.org/science/introduction