Jar Covers that Depict Shamans

It’s common knowledge that the people who lived a long time ago considered the shaman an important part of the community. The shaman could be as powerful as the chieftain and could even be the chieftain himself. So if the shaman died, it was perhaps only fitting for the people to remember or try to immortalize him for his significant role. Apparently, this is what the burial jar people did about 1,500 years ago. In a paper, anthropologist Marcelino Maceda states that some jar covers found in Kulaman Plateau indicate that the bones inside the jars are that of a tribal priest or medicine man.

Maceda presents thirty-five jar covers in the paper, and three of these, though anthropomorphic like most of the others, have uncanny shapes or markings. They are listed below. The first number in each item reflects the number of the artifact as it appears in the paper, and the second number is the field or museum number. (KN stands for Kan-Nitong Cave.) Also included are relevant portions of Maceda’s descriptions of the jar covers.

9. M-C0007 (KN)
[This gable-shaped cover has] two bas-relief anthropomorphic figures. The first figure is a human resembling a flying lizard.

16. KN-16-0188
The . . . anthropomorphic figure assumes a snake-like or lizard-shaped human head. . . . The face is triangular; the ears extend from the top of the head down to the level of the lower part of the jar and are similar to the hood of a cobra. . . . This figure may represent a shaman who could change his face at will or a medicine man whose forte is curing snake bites.

17. M-00018 (KN)
The figure has a pointed head arising from two triangular ears. . . . This anthropomorphic figure is probably that of a shaman who could change from one form to another, i.e., to a lizard or snake.

I like Maceda’s interpretations of the designs of the three jar covers. Shamans fascinate me; several of the short stories I’ve written have shamans in them. I wonder, though, if Maceda is being too imaginative in the case of Jar Cover No. 16. The ears that are “similar to the hood of a cobra” may just be enlarged thyroid glands. Goiter is not uncommon among present-day Dulangan Manobos due to nutritional deficiency in their diet. The case must have been worse among the burial jar people about 1,500 years ago. It’s possible that the jar cover is simply depicting an ordinary tribesman with an ordinary affliction, not a leader with supernatural abilities. We can’t know for sure. For now, we can only speculate. Everyone can be an expert. Further research should be done on the burial jars. The items that have been discovered should be reviewed in light of more recent archaeological findings, and Kulaman Plateau should be explored again for possible burial sites that have not been disturbed yet.

M-C0007 (no. 9 in Maceda’s paper) has a figure of a human being
resembling a lizard, probably indicating that the person
buried in the jar was a shaman or magician.

Manobo Bags

My hometown named its annual festival after the solok, but the Manobo basket I like most is the kelepi, shown in this photo. To know the different types of Manobo baskets, check out my post the previous Friday.

I failed to properly identify this bag displayed in Delesan Menubo. Among my list of Manobo baskets, the description of a kampilu is the closest to this bag: “oval, vine, tightly woven, large.” This bag, though, is made of reed instead of vine. Based on the description, a kampilu should look like a huge kelepi, but I didn’t see any such basket in the display room. Thus, for now, I’m calling this object a kampilu.

Jar Covers that Indicate Age

Marcelino Maceda, the first anthropologist to formally study the limestone burial jars of Kulaman Plateau, says in a paper that the lines in some of the jar covers may not be merely decorative. He believes that they might be an indication of the age of the person buried in the jar. Such markings are found in six of the thirty-five jar covers that Maceda discusses in the paper. They are listed below. The first number in each item reflects the number of the artifact as it appears in the paper. The second number is the field or museum number. KN stands for Kan-Nitong Cave, and FE stands for Fenefe Cave. I also added Maceda’s descriptions of the features that possibly indicate age.

8. KN-17-A—small and has six flutings on one side of the gable, possibly for a female child
14. KN-11-A—has a line drawing of a human with a vulva on one side of the gable and has angular cuts at the corner of the gable
15. KN-12-0142—shaped like the head of a man and has twenty-five parallel flutings covering the base
20. KN-45-0330—has fifteen large serrations and twenty-one small ones at the top of the gable
26. KN-49-0134—has ten to eleven angular cuts on the corners of the gable, possibly for two young females
33. KN-34-0221 20—has twenty flutings at the base of the pagoda

KN-12-0142 (no. 15 in Maceda’s paper) has twenty-five parallel flutings at the base, just below the neck (barely visible in the photo). Maceda believes the flutings may represent the age of the man buried in the jar.

Manobo Baskets

Get to know your Manobo baskets. Here’s a basic guide, based on the Cotabato Manobo Classified Vocabulary by the Summer Institute of Linguistics and on my own research:

baskit—round, rattan, open weave, with handle, small to medium
alat or melit—round, rattan, open weave, no handle, large
solok—round, bamboo, tightly woven, without lid, small to medium
sinagpeng—round, bamboo, tightly woven, with lid, small to medium
suladan—round, bamboo, tightly woven, large
kelepi—oval, vine, tightly woven, small
kampilu—oval, vine, tightly woven, large

Sinagpengs have lids and soloks don’t. Take note

of that very simple difference.

My bro demonstrates how the Dulangan Manobos

carry their baskets. Now you know why

the slings are unusually long.

Jar Covers that Indicate Sex

Look at the base of the jar cover, specifically at the dot-like protrusion between the leg-like carvings. The protrusion indicates that the person buried in the jar was male. On the left-hand corner of the photo is KN-9 (no. 25 in Maceda’s paper), an amalgamation of human head and glans penis.

When I was still working in Cebu, I once joked to an officemate that my hometown—Kulaman Plateau—had 1,500-year-old dildos. I was referring, of course, to the phallus-shaped lids of some of the limestone jars. I never repeated that joke on social media, even if I was fond at the time of posting on Facebook almost everything that was happening in my life, simply because I thought it was inappropriate. The jars, after all, were used for burial and therefore sacred. Now, though, I’m making that joke public because I realized, after thoroughly reading a paper by anthropologist Marcelino Maceda, that it wasn’t my mind’s fault if it associated some of the jar covers with human sex organs. I learned from the paper that, indeed, the jar covers might have been made phallic deliberately. For the carvers 1,500 years ago, because they didn’t have a system of writing yet, the best way to indicate the sex of dead people was to draw or carve their sex organs on the jars that they had been buried in.

In the paper “Preliminary Studies of the Figures and Ornamentation of Some Selected Jar Covers from Kulaman Plateau (Southwestern Cotabato), Island of Mindanao, Philippines,” published in Anthropos in 1967, Maceda states that of the thirty-five selected jar covers, more than half indicates whether the remains inside them belong to a male or female individual. Fourteen of the covers appear to point out that they contain men. They are listed below. The first number in each item reflects the number of the artifact as it appears in Maceda’s paper. The second number is the field or museum number. KN stands for Kan-Nitong Cave, and FE stands for Fenefe Cave.

9. M-C0007 (KN)—shaped like a gable, has a bas-relief of a human resembling a flying lizard, assumed to depict a shaman
11. KN-20-0128—shaped like a standing human being with a lingam between the thighs
13. KN-34-0265—realistic bust of a male child
15. KN-12-0142—shaped like a human head, size and look seems to depict an important man
16. KN-16-0188—shaped like a human head with something that resembles the hood of a cobra, assumed to depict a shaman
17. M-00018 (KN)—shaped like a human head but with triangular forehead and ears, assumed to depict a shaman
18. FE-11-8—shaped like a standing human being with a hanging chin that possibly depicts a beard and whiskers, with additional line drawing of a human figure at the back
21. M-C003 (FE)—shaped like a human head, with “realistic” features
22. KN-34-0166—human bust “probably” representing “a young male specimen”
23. KN-49-A—made of clay, shaped like a human being leaning backward, possibly representing a leader or a child (due to its smallness) watching an event
24. M-001 (FE)—shaped like a human head with a haughty expression, probably depicting a male leader
25. KN-9—phallic with features of a human face on one side
27. M-C005—phallic with features of a human face on one side
28. KN-5-0102—phallic with features of a human face on one side

The paper also states that number 7, KN-15-0294, “indicates that the bones contained in the jar were those of a male individual.” I wonder if the specified is a typographical error. The paper states that the cover is gable-shaped and the human figure on one side of the gable has widespread legs. Maceda normally associates these features with female specimens, as in these nine jar covers:

2. KN-17-0164—shaped like a gable, with a human bas-relief that has widespread legs
3. KN-12-0157—shaped like a gable, with spiral fluting
4. KN-8-0015—shaped like a gable, with honeycomb figures
8. KN-17-A—shaped like a gable, with diamond figure incised on one side
14. KN-11-A—shaped like a gable, has abstraction of a human figure with a vulva, has another figure showing the buttocks of a woman with the yoni extending forward
19. KN-17-0166—shaped like a gable, with line drawings of human figures emphasizing breasts and buttocks
20. KN-45-0330—shaped like a gable, has “abstractions which may indicate a female specimen”
26. KN-49-0134—shaped like a pyramid, has lines representing two human figures, one of which has a double yoni and the other has one yoni
34. FE-X-24—shaped like a pyramid, has a line drawing of a woman with mammary glands, womb, and yoni

Not all the figures, of course, is clearly phallic or yonic. Number 12, KN-18-B, is shaped like a standing human being with a lingam between four legs, indicating two men, a couple, or twins. Number 10, KN-50-103, has “a figure at its lower part which is a line drawing of a woman with buttocks emphasized,” and “a stick figure with an excavated female genitalia is found a little lower than where the two feet almost meet.” Maceda believes that number 10 is the cover of a jar containing a specimen of an intersexed individual. If he is right, the lid must be the oldest record in Philippine history about homosexuality.

Maceda believes that the widespread legs of the figure in KN-17-0164 indicate that a woman was buried in the jar. He also believes that gable-shaped jar covers, resembling houses, were used for women.

Manobo Pouches

Traditional Manobo men own a cloth bag called puyot, into which they put their betel quid and other important things. According to Defending the Land, a book on ancestral domain claims in Mindanao, a puyot is “usually colored blue” and “slung around [the] forehead even in plowing the field, to reach out to while resting from the task.

The other puyot displayed in Delesan Menubo is plaid and looks more “tribal.” Its string is also made of abaca, a native fiber. The string of the blue puyot, shown in the first photo above, is made of a synthetic material.

Just like how they wear their tubaw, Manobo men wear their puyot as they please. This grandfather prefers to sling the string on his shoulder and keep the cloth bag on his chest.

Ten Discoveries from Maceda’s Paper

The jars that anthropologist Marcelino Maceda studied are now on display
at the University of San Carlos Museum, in Cebu City.

I can’t emphasize enough the value of the research papers written by anthropologist Marcelino Maceda. Reading them has made me understand better and appreciate more the limestone burial jars of Kulaman Plateau. One article alone—specifically “Preliminary Studies of the Figures and Ornamentation of Some Selected Jar Covers from Kulaman Plateau (Southwestern Cotabato), Island of Mindanao, Philippines,” published in Anthropos in 1967—has given me so much information. Many of what I learned from the paper are new to me, and some confirm what I have known or conjectured before. The following are ten of the facts that fascinate me most:

1. The jars aren’t just made of limestone. Maceda says some of the jars are made of “young gypsum.” He therefore uses the general term soft stone in describing the jars. I might continue to use limestone though because it indicates right away that the jars are white.

2. Some of the jars are made of clay. Maceda believes the burial jar people might have used clay at first, but because clay was limited in the area, they turned to the huge blocks of stone in dry riverbeds. They were quite resourceful, weren’t they?

3. More than six hundred specimens were discovered. Maceda’s team explored two caves—Fenefe and Kan-Nitong—in the hamlet of Menteng, and they were able to dig up “burial jars (soft stone and clay) and covers, human bones, stone flakes and semi-polished stone tools, ornaments (made of ivory, clay, shell, and iron), animal bones and pottery (pots and shards).”

4. The Dulangan Manobo might not have made the jars. I’ve discussed this in my post the previous Monday, so I won’t repeat here the explanations.

5. The jars were being wet while carved with stone tools. Needless to say, carving the jars 1,500 years ago required a great doze of patience. The carvers only had polished stones as tools, so it was difficult to carve the blocks of stones. Fortunately for them, the stones are softer when wet, so while working the stones, the carvers “subjected [them] to a wetting process.”

6. The phallic designs were done on purpose. I’m not just being dirty-minded. Maceda says the designs of the jar covers are an attempt of the carvers to describe the dead person. Indeed, for nonliterate people, the best way to indicate a person’s sex is to draw or carve the shape of his sex organ. For female bodies, of course, the designs on the jar covers are yonic.

7. Lines may indicate age. Maceda says that the “flutings,” “angular cuts,” or “serrations” on some of the artifacts indicate the age of the specimens inside the jars when they died. Maceda observes this in six out of the thirty-five jar covers discussed in the article. He puts a question mark, however, in each of the statements about age, which means that he’s not really sure if the burial jar people had any system of writing numbers.

8. Some figures depict shape-shifting shamans. In three out of the thirty-five jar covers, Maceda observes in them anthropomorphic figures that may be depicting “culture heroes” who can assume the form of snakes or lizards. He believes that the jars possibly contain the bones of shamans, spirit mediums, and the like.

9. Maceda must be the first person to officially call Kulaman a plateau. The anthropologist says that his “companion informed him that somewhere in ‘Kulaman Valley’ were several caves” where jars had been seen. Maceda puts a number in superscript after Kulaman Valley and then explains in the footnote, “Actually this is a dissected plateau with an elevation of more than 2,000 feet. Hence, in the title and in the paper itself this is simply referred to as Kulaman Plateau.”

10. Some of jar covers look like a pagoda or stepped mountain. This is particularly surprising to me because I’ve never seen one in the museums I’ve been to. Maceda’s article includes a photo of two such jar covers. I wonder where they winded up. Not in the University of San Carlos Museum, for sure. My memory and my file photos tell me that there are no pagoda-like or stepped jar covers there.

The World-Class White Cave of Sultan Kudarat

Hidden in the mountains of South Central Mindanao, more than 900 meters above sea level, is a cave that is perhaps the most beautiful in the country and no doubt one of the most beautiful in the world. The cave, located in the village of Kuden in Senator Ninoy Aquino town, Sultan Kudarat province, was discovered just the previous decade, so it has been known only to the locals and to a handful of spelunkers, travel bloggers, and tourists. Though the underground paradise has been given the name “Lagbasan Cave,” after the Dulangan Manobo term for “bypass,” a more fitting name would be “White Cave,” for the cavern is swathed from the floor to the ceiling with immaculate white and cream-colored stone formations.

White Cave so far has been found to have at least three chambers, but for conservation reasons, only one is open to tourists. The chamber, though, offers more than enough. It is at least 40 meters wide, 50 meters high, and 250 meters long, and more than 80 percent of it is covered with stalactites, stalagmites, and other speleothems. The first ones to greet you are columns, many of which are taller than an average human being. Formed millimeter by millimeter over thousands of years, they look like corals piled on top of one another and then coated with milk. But don’t think that you’ve seen the best feature of the cave. The view gets more and more awe-inspiring as you walk further.

The floor of the cave is not even. It is composed of tiny hills filled with stone formations of various shapes and sizes, each one a beauty, like a garden of wild flowers left to grow freely. The tourist guide will lead you through a maze of flowstones, gypsum flowers, stalagmites, and columns, and to reiterate, these rocks and clusters of rocks are white or off-white. In some spots, you have to hold on to ropes to pull yourself up a slope or across a small crevice. The landscape is dreamlike, but some of the rocks, or their parts, uncannily resemble familiar objects, such as dog’s teeth, transparent straws, a large piggy bank, and a figurine of Cupid. At the end of the chamber is a flat area the size of a basketball court, and on one side of it is a mass of rock that looks like a huge multi-layered throne. On the opposite side is a long deep trench draped with stalactites.

An expert from the National Speleological Society of the United States, consulted by the Department of Tourism, explored White Cave in 2008 and called it world-class. He also said that some of the stone formations in the cave are so unusual that they do not fit existing classifications. But despite the seemingly hyperbolic yet accurate descriptions of the tourist spot, it has remained largely a secret. This is due to the remoteness of its location. From Isulan, the capital town of Sultan Kudarat, SNA is two to three hours away by jeepney, van, or skylab (public utility motorcycle). To get to Kuden from the capital village of SNA, you may hire a skylab or use your own vehicle. The trip takes fifteen to twenty minutes only. However, from the center of Kuden to its hamlet of Siokong, where White Cave is located, you have to travel again for two hours, and from the center of Siokong to the cave, you have to climb on foot a forested slope for forty minutes. You might wonder if seeing the cave is worth the effort. Among those who have been there, the answer is a resounding yes.

If you’re planning your next getaway, SNA might just be the perfect place for you. It’s destined to be the Sagada of Mindanao. Like the well-known backpacking destination in Luzon, SNA is mountainous and home to indigenous people—not Igorots, however, but Dulangan Manobos, one of the least documented lumads—though majority of the local population now is Ilonggos, Ilocanos, and Cebuanos who migrated to the area half a century ago. Similar to Sagada’s hanging coffins, SNA has limestone burial jars, estimated to be 1,500 years old, but these jars have not been preserved or curated in the town, and most of them have been taken away. (They are on display now at the Museum of the Filipino People in Luneta, the Ayalas-owned museums in Makati and Davao, the university museums in Cebu and Dumaguete, and in some private galleries.) Furthermore, White Cave is just one of the dozens of caves that SNA has, and coffee is flowing in the town. SNA produces about 25 percent of coffee in Sultan Kudarat, and Sultan Kudarat, the number 1 coffee-producing province in the Philippines, produces about 25 percent of coffee in the country.

To get to White Cave, you must coordinate with the local government of Kuden, for the village keeps the key—literally. To protect the cave from reckless adventurers and souvenir hunters, the local government installed at the narrow entrance a small door made of steel bars. The village also collects an entrance fee of P170 per head and imposes a minimum requirement of 10 tourists per visit. Solo backpackers or small groups are welcome, but you must pay the minimum fee. And to make sure you don’t get lost in Sultan Kudarat province, tell the people, especially the drivers, that you’re going to Kulaman, not Senator Ninoy Aquino or SNA. Though the town has been using its official name for almost thirty years, people in the province still use the name of the capital village even when referring to the whole town. In many local campaign materials, Kulaman is touted as a land of “a hundred caves with a thousand thrills.” That’s a fitting description. To experience the thousand thrills, though, you don’t have to visit all the one hundred caves or so. One cave, the White Cave of Kuden, is enough. More than enough.

(Blogger’s note: The photos above are owned by the tourism office of the municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino. I wrote this piece for the travel website of a major television network, but I decided not to submit at the last minute. I don’t like the way the editor is handling contributions. The section of the site that I wanted to be part of is something like citizen journalism. I noticed, however, that the editor uses her own byline and then just mentions the source in the article. She must have reasons. Maybe the contributions are badly written and she has to do a lot of revisions. All the same, I believe that there is no enough justification to deprive contributors of due recognition. The website does not pay them after all, and it is part of the job of an editor to polish accepted submissions.)

How to Wear a Tubaw

Among the Dulangan Manobo people, the datu (chieftain) wears a tubaw (headscarf) almost all the time. The scarf is a symbol of their high standing in the community. But as far as I know, ordinary men may also wear a tubaw. It’s not prohibited. (As to women, they don’t wear a tubaw; they wear headdresses instead.) I like tubaws. I like wearing them, especially on important occasions. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because wearing a tubaw is an easy way to draw attention to myself. Non-indigenous men rarely wear a tubaw, if at all, and I like being different—I sometimes like showing people that I’m different. Perhaps it’s also because I simply can’t resist the exquisiteness of tubaws. They have simple yet regal designs. Indeed, the question should not be “Why do I wear a tubaw?” It should be “Why are we not wearing it?” We wear Western clothing most of the time, and we don something K-Pop or anime if we feel like experimenting. So why not tribal? Why not a tubaw? It’s our own. You can even express your creativity with a tubaw. There’s no prescribed way of wrapping the cloth around your head and tying its ends. Just look at the men below. The styles of their tubaws reveal different personalities. I can create a life story for each of them based on the headscarves alone.