‘Manobos Didn’t Make the Jars’

Late last year, I was finally able to read thoroughly the papers written by Marcelino Maceda, the anthropologist from Cebu who conducted the first scientific explorations of the archaeological sites in Kulaman Plateau. Three of the papers were published in Anthropos magazine in 1960s, and the three are currently available online on Jstor.org. I had long found access to the papers—I was quoting them in my posts as early as 2013—but I would only skim them for whatever information I needed. It was only around September last year when I had the leisure to read the whole text, from the introduction to the conclusion, from the title to the footnotes and list of references.

One of the things that I long knew but I have not mentioned in this blog is Maceda’s theory on who really made the limestone burial jars. In a 1967 paper, he states that it could not have been the Dulangan Manobos. Do I hear you gasping in shock now? Maceda says the burial practices of the present-day Dulangan Manobos do not involve secondary burial—in other words, they do not take out from the coffin or dig up their dead and move the bones to a receptacle—so they or their ancestors could not have carved the jars out of limestone. That’s Maceda’s main argument. You may read the paper for the supporting information.

Maceda says he has more reason to believe that the people who made the burial jars were “a part of the Malayo-Polynesian group that passed the Philippines on their way to the other islands of the Pacific.” He anchors his theory on researches made by other anthropologists. Now who am I to argue against men with PhD’s?

As far as I know also, as someone who grew up in Kulaman Plateau, the Dulangan Manobos do not practice secondary burial, but I want to believe that their ancestors did and the practice was just abandoned or forgotten some generations ago. I think this can be proven by a DNA test. If the DNA in the bones found in the burial jars has a high percentage of similarity to the DNA of the Dulangan Manobos living in the area today, then the jar makers might simply be the ancestors of the Dulangan Manobos. In any case, I won’t be surprised or disappointed if it’s proven some way that the jars are indeed a trace of a transient culture, a lost people. The Dulangan Manobos do not care much about the burial jars. In 1950s and 1960s, they were involved in the indiscriminate smuggling of the artifacts out of Kulaman Plateau and into the hands of greedy collectors. The Dulangan Manobos would not have sold the jars in such a scale if the jars had been sacred to them. Who would sell the bones of his ancestors?

I came across a lot of other interesting information in Maceda’s papers, and I’m going to share them with you in the coming weeks. I’ll be writing about the sexual images carved on the burial jars, why the sultan of Kulaman may not have the right to call himself so, and other related topics, if I have enough time and energy to write.

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.