On a 2011 visit to the Museé du Quay Branly in Paris, I was immediately drawn to a featured Mayan exhibit. Among the first artifacts encountered were some rather strange looking objects, described as "Eccentric Flints" - a jagged piece of flint with sharp curved edges - its ceremonial use stated to be a mystery and unknown to modern scholars. I immediately intuitively sensed this device was used as a priestly sacrificial / ceremonial "gut-ripper" due to the sharp inner edge corners of the design, which were quite evident, as well as the sharp end tips of the blade. Prominent Mayan face profiles are seen on several of the flints, with some having blades coming off of blades, off of blades, in an almost fractal, "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" type of self-symmetry.
Some of these artifacts seem far more "eccentric" than others, but all feature razor-sharp edges used for cutting, slicing or skinning, a sharpened point for piercing, and nearly all of them have hooked blades with sharpened inner corners, known today as a "gut-ripper" hook or blade. Several of the flints have a hilt which would seem to indicate they may have been attached to a staff or some kind of handle for ceremonial use, the one bit of obvious information included in the museum's exhibit about the device's likely use.
There are more than a few parallels between these ancient Mayan tool designs, and our modern counterparts:
Perhaps cognitive dissonance, or the uneasiness of what specifically these tools may have been used for, was what prevented modern scholars from seeing the seemingly obvious?