Public Zone 公開區 > Travelogues 遊記相薄
North Sulawesi, Indonesia 2010
chin:
I am about 60% through posting pictures and comments. I will continue tomorrow.
chin:
On 2-Apr-2010 we visited a special burial site.
What do special about this place? They preserved artifacts of a peculiar burial "traditional" that lasted about 600 years - from 1200 to 1800. They put the dead in a stone "family tomb-box". The following series of pictures tells the story.
First, a strong man from the village would find very large boulder, and crave a box out of the rock. The shape is roughly a box at the bottom, with a roof shaped top. The decoration of the top varies, as we shall see in the subsequent pictures.
Then, this strong man would carry the rock box and the roof cover back to the village.
chin:
The first shows that once back at the village, the burial box would be placed very near the house. (Also note the typical Manado house.) The right side of the picture shows the family putting the dead's personal belongings into the burial box. (It's not exactly a burial, because the box is not buried in an sense.)
In the next picture, the dead is being put into the box, in a sit down position. The heavy rock roof cover is then put on top, and allow the body inside to decompose.
In the last picture, our guide was explaining to us the traditions and details. For example, the little bell like feature on top of the roof denotes how many dead were buried inside the box.
chin:
The real stone burial boxes. Some are taller than me, and some are hip high. I took this picture at my eye level.
These "boxes" are at least 200 years old, because the practice was stopped in around 1800. The oldest one is about 800 years old dating back to around 1200.
Each family would have it's own burial box. All family members were buried in the same box. However if a family member died with 4 years of the last dead, they would "borrow" neighbor's or relative's, to allow enough time for the old body to decompose.
chin:
This picture shows a broken one, and shows the scale of the box. The whole box was chiseled out from a single rock!
This practice of burial was ended in around 1800, after 600 years of practice. The main reason was that the people living in the house started to get sick. I can only imagine that this implies the burial boxes, placed so close to house, were the source of the health problem. Maybe one of the reasons was that after used for generations, the roof like cover is no long tight enough to contain whatever bad stuff coming from decomposing bodies. Especially when someone died from sickness, that sickness could still spread from the boxes.
When I told me friend about this, we were wondering if this is an example of "anthropological evolution". When a culture practicing undesirable acts, either the bad practice needs to stop, or the culture dies. However, if we put this argument to the extreme, it seems to justify many atrocities & predatory or even genocidal actions.
Another related example come from a book I read many years ago. The book was called Vanishing Languages, or something to that effect. That book was about many ancient languages, especially those without written form, were disappearing fast and replaced by English or the likes. The author laments the lost of historic treasure, cultural diversity, etc... In my own observation of people around me, language shaped one's value and culture more than we realized. The language structure and way of expressing dictates how we think. Unfortunately the vanishing language is just part of revolution - that the less competitive one submits.
Anyway, let get back on track to the burial boxes...
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