I was en route to Bogo City yesterday morning when I got a call from Giles Villamor, the young and dynamic municipal planning officer of Medellin town, who said that workers constructing a covered court at the public elementary school in the coastal barangay of Kawit had unearthed a lot of skeletons. Aware of the importance of such finds, Giles immediately visited the area the other day and ordered the workers to stop whatever they were doing.
As I listened to him on the phone, I thought to myself, “Uh-oh this might be another Iron Age burial site like the one we found in San Remigio.” After all, these two towns were adjacent to each other. And the circumstances appear similar. The Kawit Elementary School, like the kapuahan in San Remigio where we unearthed jar burials, faces the shoreline and as fate would have it, simple construction workers, once again digging post holes, not archaeologists, had accidentally unearthed human remains.
I quickly told my Kabilin television crew to divert momentarily to Medellin, instead of our itinerary, Bogo City, as part of our continuing shoot for the upcoming episode on the Chinese in Cebu. Indeed, on arriving at the site, my thoughts drifted back to the Lapyahan Public Beach in San Remigio, where, since last year, we have been excavating burials dating to about 1,600 yeas ago. Incidentally, an exhibit of significant finds from that site is still going on at University of San Carlos Museum, open to the public for free at its downtown campus.
What met me in Kawit were deep holes now gouged on the soft sandy soil, barely a week after work began. Strangely, teachers in the school seemed to have had no inkling of what was happening in their midst. Perhaps a sad commentary on their level of curiosity about our prehistory? I will not be quick to judge them thus harshly. Maybe they were just to engrossed with their teaching duties. Or maybe they already saw the burials but realized they were ill-equipped to do any on-site analysis of these skeletons.
I was immediately shown the meter-wide and two-meter deep holes where the skeletons were recovered. Strangely, the workers told me that the skeletons were buried in different positions, as if hastily buried, some on their sides. A cursory look at one skull placed on top of the heap of human bones in the drum told me that it was of an adult male, perhaps no older than 30 or so. I was told that no trade ware ceramics or porcelain dishes or even earthenware fragments were recovered with the burials, roughly numbering to a dozen individuals. Some residents even averred that these were probably U.S. soldiers who died during the fierce battle with retreating Japanese troops in 1945 since the skeletons were large. A close inspection of some leg bones protruding from the drum told me that at least hat one was not tall at all.
I did manage to recover a broken but repairable celadon bowl, roughly dating to the 1400s, a broken earthenware pot and, to my greatest surprise, a very large Binga or Bailer shell, with its inner structure neatly removed so as to make it useful for scooping or bailing out water from a baroto or banca.
The presence of the Chinese celadon bowl made some 600 yeas ago, and the small undecorated earthenware pot, were obviously not indicative of the Iron Age (roughly 1,100 to 2,500 yeas ago) and yet here was this Bailer shell scoop, a bigger version of the one we recovered last year from an individual buried just a few meters from the former facade of the San Remigio Church. Unfortunately, no one could tell me exactly where this shell was recovered, one of the pitfalls of accidental discoveries which makes any site like this so full of unanswered questions. Herein lies this mystery: why are there so many skeletons without any accompanying grave goods and one that had at least a Chinese-made bowl? As if to compound the mystery even further, locals told me that one burial as was unearthed awhile back about a meter distant from one hole when a compost pit was being dug up. That burial was accompanied by some shell bracelets and porcelain wares but nobody could tell me where these were now.
Even stranger, I was told by them that from time to time there were burials that would be unearthed near their houses, adjacent to the school, with accompanying porcelain dishes but they just set these aside, never feeling any compulsion to dig for other possible burials around them. This goes against everything that I have long realized about the looting of burial sites all over the country. Here at long last is one place where residents did not feel the need to loot their past and I must commend the people of Kawit for not succumbing to the lure of easy money that goes with stealing from ancient burials.
The mysterious burials of Kawit will hopefully no longer remain an enigma if plans push through to carry out an excavation of the site pretty soon. I think we owe I to ourselves and the people buried there that we find the right answers to questions that for now have to remain unanswered.
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The very impressive exhibit of barangay level cultural maps and heritage objects of Talisay City is still on-going at the People’s Hall inside the Talisay City Hall. et me congratulate the organizers, led by Mayor Socrates Fernandez, Vice Mayor Allan Bucao, city administrator Richel Bacaltos and city planning officer engineer Christine Homez and the barangay chiefs and officers of the 22 barangays of the city as well as the Department of Education teachers for this very successful completion of their community heritage inventories. I invite everyone to find time to view the exhibits, which will, unfortunately, come to a close tomorrow with the awarding of prizes. Kudos to all! You make Cebu proud!