Digging and displaying in San Remigio

San Remigio—It is exhilarating to see 1,800 students from one school alone, the San Remigio National High School, coming over to learn about the past here.

Jose Rizal, on the occasion of his 150th birth anniversary this Sunday, would have been proud of this.

They have been arriving in batches of 60 every hour from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. since Tuesday to view a 10-day special travelling exhibition at the San Remigio Cultural Center. Titled “The Iron Age in San Remigio,” the exhibit features 12 large panel board posters and eight display mounts containing some of the significant finds we made during our excavations here in April and March. It is funded by the University of San Carlos Museum and co-sponsored by the National Museum of the Philippines and Cebu Provincial Tourism and Heritage Council. This is the first travelling exhibition of its kind ever in Cebu and we are not wasting any resources to get as many people, young or old, to know more about the past.

Invitations have also been sent out to other elementary and high schools in and around San Remigio. Just yesterday, students and faculty from faraway Lambusan National High School also came over. The local tourism and heritage councils of Bogo City, Medellin, Tabuelan, Tuburan, Borbon, Catmon and Sogod have also been asked to view this unique travelling museum of sorts.

The exhibition is very apt in that just a few meters from this beautiful white-sand beach venue a multination excavation, headed by the University of Guam and supported by archaeologists from USC and UP Diliman, is going on. Just yesterday, another burial, Burial No. 7, was exposed by a team of Thai, Vietnamese and American students a few meters from where we recovered six burials in March and April this year. And before the day was out, three earthenware potteries were also exposed near the feet of the burial.

These pots surely contained food as the dead travelled to the next world. But the white powdery sand on which they are buried has not been generous to these pots nor the burial. Our only concern is that one of the three pots is still partially exposed as it lies hidden beneath a pile of argamasa, Spanish-era coral rubble equivalent to today’s cement concrete, that leads directly to what was once the main portal of the Spanish-era church before it was turned the other way around in the 1980s. This appears to be way above the burial, though, and it will have to be removed by tomorrow using picks.

Gradually the pattern is emerging from the burials recovered then as well as now. Not just one but two or three pots appear to always accompany each burial. The pots are often carinated, that is, their bodies are not rounded but slope down to a sharp angle, as if creating a hip which then rounds off in an ovoid form at the bottom. We certainly hope to find more iron tools in these burials.

San Remigio is a wee bit luckier than all the other towns and cities in Cebu today. For not only do they have an international team of archaeologists and students excavating their past, their students and all residents interested in that past also have the opportunity to get a full view of how it is done (through the ongoing dig) and what have been found so far (through the travelling exhibition). Therefore, if you’re a San Remigiohanon, it is time to come back and get a glimpse of the past.

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Apropos the HP printer that didn’t work in Boljoon, the one that got replaced while we were here in San Remigio: I brought it to the Ngenius shop in Ayala Center and voila! It worked fine. All the other six or nine printers brought by my sister in February also work fine. So now we are wondering if the burials do not like us to tinker with modern technology! But kidding aside, I still trust in Hewlett Packard: my laptops and my printers are still HP, although I’m still crossing my fingers that this same printer will not fail us here in San Remigio, now that we have found another burial.