Jar Covers that Depict Shamans

It’s common knowledge that the people who lived a long time ago considered the shaman an important part of the community. The shaman could be as powerful as the chieftain and could even be the chieftain himself. So if the shaman died, it was perhaps only fitting for the people to remember or try to immortalize him for his significant role. Apparently, this is what the burial jar people did about 1,500 years ago. In a paper, anthropologist Marcelino Maceda states that some jar covers found in Kulaman Plateau indicate that the bones inside the jars are that of a tribal priest or medicine man.

Maceda presents thirty-five jar covers in the paper, and three of these, though anthropomorphic like most of the others, have uncanny shapes or markings. They are listed below. The first number in each item reflects the number of the artifact as it appears in the paper, and the second number is the field or museum number. (KN stands for Kan-Nitong Cave.) Also included are relevant portions of Maceda’s descriptions of the jar covers.

9. M-C0007 (KN)
[This gable-shaped cover has] two bas-relief anthropomorphic figures. The first figure is a human resembling a flying lizard.

16. KN-16-0188
The . . . anthropomorphic figure assumes a snake-like or lizard-shaped human head. . . . The face is triangular; the ears extend from the top of the head down to the level of the lower part of the jar and are similar to the hood of a cobra. . . . This figure may represent a shaman who could change his face at will or a medicine man whose forte is curing snake bites.

17. M-00018 (KN)
The figure has a pointed head arising from two triangular ears. . . . This anthropomorphic figure is probably that of a shaman who could change from one form to another, i.e., to a lizard or snake.

I like Maceda’s interpretations of the designs of the three jar covers. Shamans fascinate me; several of the short stories I’ve written have shamans in them. I wonder, though, if Maceda is being too imaginative in the case of Jar Cover No. 16. The ears that are “similar to the hood of a cobra” may just be enlarged thyroid glands. Goiter is not uncommon among present-day Dulangan Manobos due to nutritional deficiency in their diet. The case must have been worse among the burial jar people about 1,500 years ago. It’s possible that the jar cover is simply depicting an ordinary tribesman with an ordinary affliction, not a leader with supernatural abilities. We can’t know for sure. For now, we can only speculate. Everyone can be an expert. Further research should be done on the burial jars. The items that have been discovered should be reviewed in light of more recent archaeological findings, and Kulaman Plateau should be explored again for possible burial sites that have not been disturbed yet.

M-C0007 (no. 9 in Maceda’s paper) has a figure of a human being
resembling a lizard, probably indicating that the person
buried in the jar was a shaman or magician.

Jar Covers that Indicate Age

Marcelino Maceda, the first anthropologist to formally study the limestone burial jars of Kulaman Plateau, says in a paper that the lines in some of the jar covers may not be merely decorative. He believes that they might be an indication of the age of the person buried in the jar. Such markings are found in six of the thirty-five jar covers that Maceda discusses in the paper. They are listed below. The first number in each item reflects the number of the artifact as it appears in the paper. The second number is the field or museum number. KN stands for Kan-Nitong Cave, and FE stands for Fenefe Cave. I also added Maceda’s descriptions of the features that possibly indicate age.

8. KN-17-A—small and has six flutings on one side of the gable, possibly for a female child
14. KN-11-A—has a line drawing of a human with a vulva on one side of the gable and has angular cuts at the corner of the gable
15. KN-12-0142—shaped like the head of a man and has twenty-five parallel flutings covering the base
20. KN-45-0330—has fifteen large serrations and twenty-one small ones at the top of the gable
26. KN-49-0134—has ten to eleven angular cuts on the corners of the gable, possibly for two young females
33. KN-34-0221 20—has twenty flutings at the base of the pagoda

KN-12-0142 (no. 15 in Maceda’s paper) has twenty-five parallel flutings at the base, just below the neck (barely visible in the photo). Maceda believes the flutings may represent the age of the man buried in the jar.

Jar Covers that Indicate Sex

Look at the base of the jar cover, specifically at the dot-like protrusion between the leg-like carvings. The protrusion indicates that the person buried in the jar was male. On the left-hand corner of the photo is KN-9 (no. 25 in Maceda’s paper), an amalgamation of human head and glans penis.

When I was still working in Cebu, I once joked to an officemate that my hometown—Kulaman Plateau—had 1,500-year-old dildos. I was referring, of course, to the phallus-shaped lids of some of the limestone jars. I never repeated that joke on social media, even if I was fond at the time of posting on Facebook almost everything that was happening in my life, simply because I thought it was inappropriate. The jars, after all, were used for burial and therefore sacred. Now, though, I’m making that joke public because I realized, after thoroughly reading a paper by anthropologist Marcelino Maceda, that it wasn’t my mind’s fault if it associated some of the jar covers with human sex organs. I learned from the paper that, indeed, the jar covers might have been made phallic deliberately. For the carvers 1,500 years ago, because they didn’t have a system of writing yet, the best way to indicate the sex of dead people was to draw or carve their sex organs on the jars that they had been buried in.

In the paper “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, Maceda states that of the thirty-five selected jar covers, more than half indicates whether the remains inside them belong to a male or female individual. Fourteen of the covers appear to point out that they contain men. They are listed below. The first number in each item reflects the number of the artifact as it appears in Maceda’s paper. The second number is the field or museum number. KN stands for Kan-Nitong Cave, and FE stands for Fenefe Cave.

9. M-C0007 (KN)—shaped like a gable, has a bas-relief of a human resembling a flying lizard, assumed to depict a shaman
11. KN-20-0128—shaped like a standing human being with a lingam between the thighs
13. KN-34-0265—realistic bust of a male child
15. KN-12-0142—shaped like a human head, size and look seems to depict an important man
16. KN-16-0188—shaped like a human head with something that resembles the hood of a cobra, assumed to depict a shaman
17. M-00018 (KN)—shaped like a human head but with triangular forehead and ears, assumed to depict a shaman
18. FE-11-8—shaped like a standing human being with a hanging chin that possibly depicts a beard and whiskers, with additional line drawing of a human figure at the back
21. M-C003 (FE)—shaped like a human head, with “realistic” features
22. KN-34-0166—human bust “probably” representing “a young male specimen”
23. KN-49-A—made of clay, shaped like a human being leaning backward, possibly representing a leader or a child (due to its smallness) watching an event
24. M-001 (FE)—shaped like a human head with a haughty expression, probably depicting a male leader
25. KN-9—phallic with features of a human face on one side
27. M-C005—phallic with features of a human face on one side
28. KN-5-0102—phallic with features of a human face on one side

The paper also states that number 7, KN-15-0294, “indicates that the bones contained in the jar were those of a male individual.” I wonder if the specified is a typographical error. The paper states that the cover is gable-shaped and the human figure on one side of the gable has widespread legs. Maceda normally associates these features with female specimens, as in these nine jar covers:

2. KN-17-0164—shaped like a gable, with a human bas-relief that has widespread legs
3. KN-12-0157—shaped like a gable, with spiral fluting
4. KN-8-0015—shaped like a gable, with honeycomb figures
8. KN-17-A—shaped like a gable, with diamond figure incised on one side
14. KN-11-A—shaped like a gable, has abstraction of a human figure with a vulva, has another figure showing the buttocks of a woman with the yoni extending forward
19. KN-17-0166—shaped like a gable, with line drawings of human figures emphasizing breasts and buttocks
20. KN-45-0330—shaped like a gable, has “abstractions which may indicate a female specimen”
26. KN-49-0134—shaped like a pyramid, has lines representing two human figures, one of which has a double yoni and the other has one yoni
34. FE-X-24—shaped like a pyramid, has a line drawing of a woman with mammary glands, womb, and yoni

Not all the figures, of course, is clearly phallic or yonic. Number 12, KN-18-B, is shaped like a standing human being with a lingam between four legs, indicating two men, a couple, or twins. Number 10, KN-50-103, has “a figure at its lower part which is a line drawing of a woman with buttocks emphasized,” and “a stick figure with an excavated female genitalia is found a little lower than where the two feet almost meet.” Maceda believes that number 10 is the cover of a jar containing a specimen of an intersexed individual. If he is right, the lid must be the oldest record in Philippine history about homosexuality.

Maceda believes that the widespread legs of the figure in KN-17-0164 indicate that a woman was buried in the jar. He also believes that gable-shaped jar covers, resembling houses, were used for women.

Ten Discoveries from Maceda’s Paper

The jars that anthropologist Marcelino Maceda studied are now on display
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.

‘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.