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Mistades,Judy Ann N.

A-102

THE MANUNGGUL JAR AS A VESSEL 

OF HISTORY

by: Michael Charleston B. Chua

"…the work of an artist and master potter."--Robert Fox 

27th April 1995—I was 11 years old when I visited the National Museum -- the repository of our cultural, natural and historical heritage. I remembered the majesty of climbing those steps and walking past the Neo-classical Roman columns until I was inside the Old Congress Building. 

Today, if the Metropolitan Museum’s identifying piece was the painting Virgenes Cristianas Expuestas Al Populacho by Felix Resurrecion Hidaldo and the GSIS Museum its Parisian Life by the painter Juan Luna, the National Museum’s, El Spoliarium, Luna’s most famous piece. Many people come to the museum just for this painting. But another less-popular but quite significant piece was the Manunggul jar.

The Manunggul jar was one of the numerous jars found in a cave believed to be a burial site (Manunggul, was part of the archaeologically significant Tabon Cave Complex in Lipuun Point, Quezon, Palawan) that was discovered on March 1964 by Victor Decalan, Hans Kasten and other volunteer workers from the United States Peace Corps. The Manunggul burial jar was unique in all respects. Dating back to the late Neolithic Period (around 710 B.C.),  Robert Fox described the jar in his landmark work on the Tabon Caves:

The burial jar with a cover featuring a ship-of-the-dead is perhaps unrivalled in Southeast Asia; the work of an artist and master potter. This vessel provides a clear example of a cultural link between the archaeological past and the ethnographic present. The boatman is steering rather than padding the "ship." The mast of the boat was not recovered. Both figures appear to be wearing a band tied over the crown of the head and under the jaw; a pattern still encountered in burial practices among the indigenous peoples in Southern Philippines. The manner in which the hands of the front figure are folded across the...