The limestone burial jar in Davao Museum has no
label, but I know
a Kulaman jar when I see one.
I was in Davao City the previous weekend for the 6th Philippine International Literary Festival. I was one of the three speakers on the topic “New Mindanawon Writings.” I just pretty much talked about myself, which on hindsight is quite embarrassing, so I’m not going to dwell on it. Besides, the speaking engagement isn’t closely related to the topic of this blog. What I’m going to share here instead is my side trip to Davao Museum, the collection of which includes—dun, dun, duuun—a limestone burial jar from Kulaman Plateau!
Gracielle, a co-fellow of mine in two writers workshops, went with me to Insular Village, where the museum is located. The museum is small, just two-story high, but quite swanky. You would be surprised to find out that it was “inaugurated and blessed” in 1977, as a marker near the entrance indicates. Freshly painted, or just well preserved, it doesn’t have the musty smell or eerie feel of most museums. The ground floor has a broad collection of Mindanao traditional textiles, and the second floor has motley of Mindanao artworks and artifacts. I wasn’t really able to inspect each item and take in its beauty. My mind had nothing in it but the burial jar from Kulaman Plateau. Before I went to Davao Museum, I had known that the place has a Kulaman jar, so when I entered the door, all I wanted was to find the jar, examine it as closely as I could, and take photos of it for this blog. The same thing happened to me last month in Manila, when I visited the Museum of the Filipino People and a private gallery in Intramuros.
The jar in Davao Museum is a typical example of a Kulaman Plateau burial jar. The body is quadrangular. The lid is flat and square at the base, on which stands a phallic handle, but the sexual design is not obvious because the upper half of the tip is broken and missing, or at least to my eyes. The entire body and lid of the jar is covered with simple vertical flutings.
The jar is in a display case with other burial artifacts, such as wooden grave markers from Sulu and clay vessels from Gigantes Island and Samal Island. There is no label below or beside the limestone jar, but I’m sure that it’s from Kulaman Plateau because it is stated so in a booklet inside the museum. Treasures of the Davao Museum has a photo of the jar on page 83, and the caption states that “the funerary vessel . . . is from Kulaman, Sultan Kudarat” and “its angular body and its cover with an elongated handle are made of limestone.” It didn’t occur to me to ask if the booklet is for sale. It may be, for it is displayed with local history books that are for sale. To digress a little, I bought a copy of Macario Tiu’s Davao: Reconstructing History from Text and Memory, which contains a section about the Kulaman Manobos of Davao. Tiu says that the tribe must be related to the Dulangan Manobos of Kulaman Plateau. Isn’t that interesting? I have yet to read the section and the entire book fully, though, so I can’t write about the topic in this blog until next year.
I’m thankful to the National Book Development Board for inviting me as one of the sixty-plus speakers in the two-day literary event. I got a two-night accommodation in the swanky Seda. Truth be told, I was hesitant to accept the invitation. I prefer writing to talking about writing any day. My primary motivation in going to Davao was the chance to see a Kulaman jar without spending so much. But I’m not saying that I didn’t enjoy the event. I mighty did. I got the chance to buy Macario Tiu’s Davao and Butch Dalisay’s Killing Time in a War Place and have those books signed by the authors. I was reunited with some of my mentors, friends, and younger brothers in writing. I met for the first time some familiar names in Philippine literature. And of course, I learned a lot from listening to them.
The Kulaman jar in Davao Museum is displayed
with wooden grave markers and clay vessels.
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