‘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.