Manusia Purba Museum is a small prehistoric museum with significant collections of prehistoric artifacts and prehistoric human’s bones. This unique museum is located in the west tip of Bali, in Gilimanuk, Jembrana regency. Manusia Purba Museum houses collection of prehistoric bones and artifacts which were found by R.P. Soejoeno of Bali Archaeological Service during great excavation in 1962, in the village of Cekik, where the museum finally located.
Cekik site is one of the biggest necropolises found in Indonesia. In this site, the archeologists found various artifacts such as jewelries, bronze equipments, glass beads, pottery and sarcophagus, 100 complete prehistoric human skeletons adult were also found in an ancient graveyard in this excavation area. The artifacts and the bones which were found in Cekik excavation site are exhibited in this museum in a modest display.
The prima ballerina of Manusia Purba Museum is two sarcophaguses which form a set of double jar burial, it is a unique burial system in which the second jar contains a skeleton in a position of a man which his hand were tied in the back, which suggest that this unfortunate person was buried alive against his will to accompany the deceased person in the first sarcophagus.
Manusia Purba Museum of Gilimanuk houses a complete collection of early civilization in this island which provides useful information on the life and culture of ancient inhabitants of the last paradise; magnificent and important collections for a small and modest museum which is frequently unnoticed by the Balinese and the visitors.
It worth a visit but one hardly knows it exists.
