This is a guest post from Gim, my personal caveman. He prefers the word “spelunker”. Here to talk about caves and treasure. – Flisha
I miss caving. I used to do a lot of caving back in college. Heck, my thesis during my senior year was about caves! I was that hooked. I guess what drew me in was the promise of adventure. The smell of discovering something new. Like the time we found pottery shards dating to the pre-spanish era. That’s roughly 600 years ago!
I remember that day clearly. It started out as a routine day in the field. We were cave hunters, so our task was to shuttle to a certain barangay or small town and start hunting for caves. If we find one, we log its position using a handheld GPS device. If a cave seems interesting enough, we do a bit of exploring. It was on one of these little expeditions that I first caught sight of it. A tiny shard that jutted out of the soft, moist earth.
I bent down to retrieve it and noticed that it was made of reddish-brown clay with an engraving ofsome sort. A thrill of excitement shot through me. I immediately got down on all fours and started clearing away the loose earth. We found dozens of the shards. A trip to the Western Mindanao Center for Cultural Development confirmed our suspicions- the shards we found were part of an eleborate burial jar more than 600 years old!
We found more pottery fragments and even pieces of human teeth during our four months exploring the caves of our city. Our research landed a spot in our University’s journal publication. Apart from that we were asked to give lectures about caves for months after that.
Ah, I will miss those days.
