International Journal Has Three Articles on Kulaman

Finally, I'm able to read the three articles of Marcelino Maceda in the international journal Anthropos. For the non-regulars here, Maceda was the first anthropologist who formally studied the limestone burial jars of Kulaman Plateau and published his findings in research journals. He was a faculty member of the University of San Carlos, here in Cebu City.

I'm reading the articles courtesy of JSTOR, an online library known for its digitized old issues of academic publications. JSTOR, short for Journal Storage, offers most of its contents to paying subscribers only, but it allows registered users to read free up to three items at a time. As I write this, I have been registered for barely a week.

An About page of JSTOR states that the website has been allowing free limited access since last year, at around the same time I started doing research on the burial jars of Kulaman Plateau. The three articles of Maceda were the first few sources I found through Google, but I was able to open their first pages only. I must have missed the option to register, or I must have been wary that the registration process would be cumbersome. In any case, the process turned out to be fast and simple, and I'm glad I did register.

I'm still reading the articles thoroughly. Like most academic text, they're not exactly entertaining, but so far, I've discovered plenty of interesting facts. One is that Maceda actually did an excavation, as archaeologists seem to normally do. He and his companions had to dig up inside the caves to find more burial jars. Though I encountered excavation or excavated in the other journal articles on the jars, I avoided using the terms in my own write-ups because I was not sure what exactly the researchers did. The articles I read before focused on the number and features of the finds and not on the process.

I'll be generously quoting Maceda's writings in my next posts, so do drop by. You may also read the articles yourself. I've added their publication details, with links, in the Webliography page of this blog.