Jars from Lebak in Sultan Kudarat Museum

Limestone burial jars and other interesting items from Lebak town

My mother told me, “I didn’t know you wrote something about burial jars for the provincial museum.” I frowned and answered, “No, I didn’t.” She explained that she had been to the Provincial Tourism Office and Museum to transact some business and she had seen a label for burial jars there that mentioned my name. “You wrote that the jars are one thousand five hundred years old,” she added.

I figured out that the staff of the tourism office must have quoted something I wrote online. “No,” I told my mom. “It wasn’t me who said the jars are that old. I was simply quoting an anthropologist who did a test on a bone that was found inside a jar.” I was embarrassed that something scientific was attributed to me, a blogger who has too much time in his hand. I decided to visit the museum to ask the staff there to change whatever needed changing. I also wanted to see the burial jars that my mom had described. She had told me that the museum had several pieces of burial jars from the municipality of Lebak. I had not seen them before. When I went to the museum more than a year earlier, the place only had one large burial jar.

I didn’t see the label that my mom had told me about. It was supposed to be attached to the large burial jar, which had been placed in front of a display case containing Dulangan Manobo items from the municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino. When I went to the museum, the burial jar had been moved to another spot, and the label must have been lost in the process. But I did see the new burial jars, placed in front of the display case for the municipality of Lebak, and I recognized right away that the label for the jars was a verbatim quotation from an essay of mine that had appeared in Philippine Daily Inquirer. I wasn’t cited in the label, but I didn’t complain. I simply wanted to make sure that no one was quoting me as if I had a PhD and carbon-dating apparatus.

The label says the jars are from Lugping and donated by a certain Ugkaw A. Mamaku. I don’t know where exactly Lugping is. It must just be a sitio, for it’s not one of the barangays of Lebak that are listed in the 2010 Socio-Economic Profile of Sultan Kudarat Province. Mamaku must also be an ordinary Manobo or one of the lesser-known chieftains, for I can’t find his name among the datus who promulgated the Kitab, or Dulangan Manobo Customary Law, in 2011.

The new set of burial artifacts comprises one semicomplete big jar, five jar covers, and six jar pieces. The smallest of the broken pieces probably belong to one of the bigger ones. The specimens are all placed in front of the tall display case allotted for Lebak. There’s an additional semicomplete tiny jar inside the display case. I’ll give you more details about the specimens in my next post. I’ll have an inventory of them so that they can be traced or recovered in case they become missing.

One of the more beautiful specimens in Sultan Kudarat Museum

A more realistic sample compared to other anthropomorphic lids