Busacca Gallery

Antique Chinese stone clear quartz crystal small round bowl. This carefully cut and polished bowl was made in China. rock crystal was believed to have magical qualities, particularly potent for healing various ailments and protecting against disease. Rock crystal is a natural stone often used in ancient jewelry. Because of the time and skill required to fashion larger objects from it, plates and bowls and other vessels in rock crystal were considered luxury items in the old world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_carving

Stone carving is an ancient activity where pieces of rough natural stone are shaped by the controlled removal of stone. Owing to the permanence of the material, evidence can be found that even the earliest societies indulged in some form of stone work. The oldest known works of representational art are stone carvings. Often marks carved into rock or petroglyphs will survive where painted work will not. Prehistoric Venus figurines such as the Venus of Berekhat Ram may be as old as 800,000 years, and are carved in stones such as tuff and limestone. Carving stone into sculpture is an activity older than civilization itself. Prehistoric sculptures were usually human forms, such as the Venus of Willendorf and the faceless statues of the Cycladic cultures of ancient Greece. Later cultures devised animal, human-animal and abstract forms in stone. The earliest cultures used abrasive techniques, and modern technology employs pneumatic hammers and other devices. But for most of human history, sculptors used hammer and chisel as the basic tools for carving stone.