Smoked rubber

This was originally a smoked rubber ball but there's not much roundness left in it anymore. Maybe it could be referred to as a rubber pancake instead. I bought it almost 20 years ago from Milton Marques, who was the largest rubber dealer in Santarem at that time. I remember him taking me into his very large warehouse to see tons of rubber, which for the most part was made up of smoked rubber balls and the smelly coagulated latex mentioned in the previous post. I had gone there specifically to buy a sample for my collection of forest products at Bosque Santa Lucia. I selected the one you see in the image and, yes, it was almost as round as a ball. We didn't have a reception center at that time, so I placed it in Sr. Teixeira's casa de farinha, a shed where he and his family processed manioc. Over the years it got bounced around by visitors but it lost its shape. After all, it's a heavy, solid piece of rubber. If you look closely you'll see that bees are slowly but surely carrying the rubber off to their nests. For what purpose, I don't know.