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.
No comments:
Post a Comment