The 10th to 15th century Visayan kris, & earlier artifacts

[migueldiaz]

In vol. 2 of Reader's Digest's Kasaysayan: Story of the Filipino People, there's a pic (below) of a precolonial (pre-16th century) kris.

Later on, I found out that the artifact was excavated in the 1920s by an American archeologist [Carl Guthe, from the Univ. of Michigan], in the town of Loon in Bohol Island in the Visayan region of the Philippines.

This Visayan kris was estimated to be coming from the 10th to 15th century. The kris is still with the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), at its University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

More details are to follow.

[migueldiaz]

Here's a close-up of the said Visayan kris ...

[migueldiaz]

The details surrounding the Visayan kris can be found in a Univ. of Penn. PhD dissertation of a well-known Filipino archeologist, Dr. Eusebio "Bong" Dizon, from the Philippine's national museum.

The dissertation can be bought online from the university. The illustration below comes from the said paper.

Based on the graphical scale, the blade length is 36 cm (14.2"), blade thickness near the guard is 0.8 cm (5/16"), and tang length is 8 cm (3.2").

Please note also that the tang has a square/rectangular cross-section, as is the characteristic of Philippine krises.

[migueldiaz]

The textual description of the Visayan kris:

[migueldiaz]

For the technically-inclined:

[migueldiaz]

Incidentally, the dissertation covered 75 pieces from the Guthe-Michigan collection, plus another 10 artifacts from the Phil. national museum.

As to the basis of the age of the artifacts, I've just leafed through the paper (it's about 500 pages long). The 10th to 15th century dating can be found in the excerpt below.

I suppose they also used the associated Chinese ceramics excavated together with the metal artifacts. These Chinese ceramics provide a pretty accurate metric, and are used all the time ("Nacho" is an expert on this also).