A 13th To 14th Century Sub-adult Jar Burial: Report on a Rescue Excavation in Guiuan, Eastern Samar

Sherina E. Aggarao*, Alexandra S. De Leon, Hazel Ramirez, and Camille Ann Valencia

The 2024 recovery of a jar burial in Guiuan, Eastern Samar offers a rare opportunity to examine mortuary identity and practice beyond the Philippine Metal Age and into the time of maritime trade networks. The burial, recovered in cooperation with the Guiuan Municipal Office, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and the National Museum of the Philippines, contained the remains of an approximately 20-month-old sub-adult jar burial alongside a pair of gold earrings and a Yuan dynasty jarlet. While jar burial in the Philippines is conventionally associated with the Metal Age (500 BC–500 AD), the use of imported Yuan dynasty (1271-1368 CE) ceramics as burial vessels challenges this periodization and raises broader questions about the role of prestige goods in mortuary ritual, the construction of identity in death, and the integration of local communities into regional trade networks. Overall, this paper explores what the choice of a foreign vessel as a burial container may reveal about community beliefs, social status, and mortuary practice in second millennium CE in Eastern Samar.