How to Get to Davao Museum

If you want to see the Kulaman Plateau burial jar in Davao City, the first thing you must remember is that Davao Museum, where the jar can be found, is different from Museo Dabawenyo. The former is privately owned and is located in Zonta Building, 113 Agusan Circle, Insular Village 1, Lanang, Davao City. The latter is run by the local government and is near the city hall.

My friend Gracielle, who divides her time between Cotabato City and Davao City, served as my tour guide when I visited Davao Museum. I don’t know my way around Davao myself, so I can’t tell you how to get to Insular Village from any point in the city. But below is a photo of the entrance of the subdivision. That’s where we got off the jeepney that we were riding. If you’re taking a taxi or you have your own ride, I think you may enter the subdivision. Just have your name registered and get a visitor’s ID at the guardhouse.

From the gate, walk for some twenty meters, turn right, walk for some fifty meters, turn left, and then walk for some one hundred meters. To your right is the whitewashed Davao Museum, which occupies the whole area of the two-story Zonta Building. The Kulaman jar is in the Carlos O. Dominguez Jr. Gallery, on the second floor. It is displayed with other burial artifacts, such as wooden grave markers from Sulu and pottery from Gigantes Island and Samal Island.

The limestone burial jar most likely came from Barangay Salangsang, Municipality of Lebak, Province of Sultan Kudarat. I read somewhere before that it was donated by the Ayala Museum. This must be true, because according to a marker near the entrance of the museum, the benefactors of the museum are two Zobel de Ayala dons. The Ayalas co-sponsored the burial jar exploration that was conducted in Salangsang in 1960s by anthropologists who were connected with Silliman University. Some of the jars were given to the university’s museum, in Dumaguete City, and the better-looking ones were taken to the Ayala Museum, in Makati City. The best thing about the jar in Davao Museum is that it is shaped like many of Kulaman Plateau jars. When you see it, you get a glimpse of everything else.

The entrance to Insular Village

My friend Gracielle, a nurse who writes essays, in front of Davao Museum

Because the lighting is controlled inside the museum,

you can barely discern the flutings on the Kulaman

jar. For a clearer image, check out this booklet.

Kulaman Jar in Davao Museum

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 item in Davao is the quintessential Kulaman jar.

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.