University of San Carlos Museum

This guide to the University of San Carlos Museum in Cebu City opens with a carved limestone burial jar from the Kulaman Plateau, one of hundreds an anthropologist named Marcelino Maceda brought down from the highlands in the early 1960s. It traces the museum back to a first collection opened in 1908 that American bombs destroyed in 1945, and to a German missionary priest, Rudolf Rahmann, who set out to rebuild it from nothing by sending researchers into the mountains of Mindanao. Those researchers, among them Maceda and Rogelio Lopez, spent years collecting masks, tools and other ethnographic pieces from communities few outsiders had studied.