I have two scenes in the .blend. i created the pedestal textured it, then moved it into the other scene by creating a cube in scene 2(the one without the pedastal) and went to editbuttons, and while having the cube selected i selected the the pedastal in the editbuttons screen to assign the mesh to the cube.
My experience with shadows is that you really need to use a spot lamp… normal lamps don’t really seem to cast shadows… but they are good for lighting things up…
Maybe try a shadow only spot light…