THE KULAMAN PLATEAU URNS: MIRACLE OF SURVIVAL
BARMM ARTIFACTS
These 21 limestone burial urns in the care of the Bureau of Cultural Heritage of ARMM constitute a substantial cache of these rare materials extracted by archaeologists working with Silliman and San Carlos Universities, from April to June 1963, from caves at the Kulaman Plateau of what was a single Cotabato Province. Both universities hold the greater number of these objects, as do private collectors who, like the scientists, have long been in awe of their aesthetic refinement. The urns have been carbon-dated to 2,000 years before the present. That little else is known about them and their makers owes to the succeeding turn of events. The caves are in the vicinity of the municipalities of Lebak and Tran, object of weeks-long bombardment of an MNLF stronghold by the Armed Forces of the Philippines in 1973. The reverberations of war prevented scholarship.