Geronimo Cristobal

Category: Archaeology

  • Pustaha

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    The name pustaha is borrowed from the Sanskrit word pustaka meaning “book” or “manuscript.” The pustaha of the Batak in North Sumatra often contained dark and secret knowledge passed down through ritual specialists (datu). Among its most striking tales are those of black magic, where the text describes methods to destroy enemies through gruesome rites.…

  • José Rizal’s Drawings of Anting-Anting

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    Proving yet again that in any field of inquiry Rizal emerges as the ubiquitous scholar, this photograph from the Dean C. Worcester Collection at the Newberry Library (Ayer Philippine Photographs) shows a drawing of objects he reportedly discovered on a hill near Dapitan. The inscription reads: “Anillo de oro con un rubí y una medallita,…

  • The Agimat as Matrix: Conceptualizing Islamic Rematriation 

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    In an early twentieth-century catalogue from the Field Museum in Chicago, a Qur’an-inscribed agimat—a talismanic belt from Mindanao—is marked “difficult to obtain.” Composed of cloth, baroque pearls, plant matter, and sacred text, the object was classified as an ethnographic specimen, stripped of its cosmological function and ritual charge. This paper uses that object as a…

  • The Place of Shells: Making and Unmaking Archipelagic Southeast Asia

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    Summary This essay traces how vernacular spatial logics in Southeast Asia—expressed through myths, maritime movement, and ritual orientations—shaped understandings of sovereignty before the imposition of colonial borders. Drawing on the figure of the pearl as a model of layered accretion, it explores how societies in the Philippine archipelago organized space through concentric and relational forms…

  • Pearls in Islamic Art from the Umayyads to the Ottomans

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    In Islamic art and culture, pearls symbolize divine light, purity, and paradise, and serve as markers of spiritual authority and sovereign power. Nacreous objects were central to trade networks across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, integrating them into Islamic artistic and economic systems. Historical studies tell of their layered significance: as royal emblems in Late…

  • Cornell Anthropology Collection at Mapping Philippine Material Culture

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    The Cornell Anthropology Collection (CAC) houses an assortment of items from the Philippines, many of which were donated by returning veterans of the Philippine-American War in the early 20th century. These objects not only provide insight into the material culture of Mindanao but also reveal the complex history of military engagement and diplomatic exchange in…

  • A Stun of Jewels

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    Heritage issues in recent archaeological discoveries on Siniyah Island Map of the Persian Gulf, ’Omān and Central Arabia part of Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia This essay considers discussions of heritage politics around the discovery of three archaeological sites in the United Arab Emirates. In 2022, an ancient Christian monastery dating…

  • The Kingdoms of Israel and Ophir

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    and the power of a fabricated diplomatic history             And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon.                                                                                    — I Kings 9:28.            On July 30th of this year (2023), a most bizarre headline appeared in one of the leading news publications in the…

  • An Archaeology led by Strawberries

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    Atalay, Sonia. “An Archaeology led by Strawberries” in Archaeologies of the Heart. Kisha Supernant, Jane Eva Baxter, Natasha Lyons, and Sonya Atalay, editors. 2020. Springer, New York. xiv + 280. Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516), The Garden of Earthly Delights, central panel inside (left side), detail: People sit around a large strawberry, c.1490 and 1500 A…

  • Death and Mortuary Rituals in Mainland Southeast Asia

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    W. Higham, Charles F. “Death and Mortuary Rituals in Mainland Southeast Asia: From Hunter-Gatherers to the God Kings of Angkor.” Chapter. In Death Rituals, Social Order and the Archaeology of Immortality in the Ancient World: ‘Death Shall Have No Dominion’, edited by Colin Renfrew, Michael J. Boyd, and Iain Morley, 280–300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,…