Trixie Cruz-Angeles: The Manunggul Jar

By Rose Beatrix C. Angeles (Trixie Cruz-Angeles)

Sylvia Morningstar says that we, the Filipino people, are older than our conquerors. I believe it. My favorite artifact -- emphasis on the ART -- is the Manunggul Jar. Its a Neolithic Age, nearly complete burial jar found in the Tabon Cave Complex in Palawan back in 1964.

Robert Fox describes it as follows:

"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 chest is also a widespread practice in the Islands when arranging the corpse.

Trixie Cruz-Angeles: Lost and Longing

By Rose Beatrix C. Angeles (Trixie Cruz-Angeles)

INQUIRER.net

First Posted 07/29/2008

My love is like a river in the Sea of Tranquility

“The Arms of Orion” (theme of Batman Forever)

BEHOLD AND WEEP- at the totally different face of Manila a hundred years ago, with its esteros flowing as a network of transportation and trade. In that era, the American master architect Daniel Burnham “believed that with proper planning he could turn Manila into a ‘city equal to the greatest of the Western World,’ with a bay like Naples’s, a winding river like Paris’s and canals like those of Venice,” writes Rose Beatrix Angeles. 

(Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Manila was becoming known as the Venice of the Far East. This was due in no small part to the admiration of the practical and aesthetic possibilities of the esteros or inland rivers by one Daniel Burnham, then architect of Manila.

Yes, he’s the Burnham of the park in Baguio and the Manila Burnham plan. Burnham believed that with proper planning he could turn Manila into a “city equal to the greatest of the Western World,” what with a bay like that of Naples, a winding river like that of Paris and canals like those of Venice.