Karaweweng/ Necklace

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Solheim II, Wilhelm G. " Philippine Prehistory." ( (In Casal, et.al. The People & Art of the Philippines. Los Angeles: University of California, 1981), pp. 62,69-71

Assembled to make the karaweweng are evenly sized cowrie shells and polychromatic glass beads. The karaweweng, a form of necklace worn with the large elaborate section at the woman’s back, and the single beadwork row at the front, is unique to the Ga’dang-speaking people of Paracelis, Mountain Province, in the northern Luzon Cordillera. (Ga’dang-speaking groups also live in pockets in the lowland areas of Nueva Viscaya, but were Christianized early in the Spanish colonization.) The small sizes and colors of the beads—red, yellow, blue, white—are ubiquitous in the Ga’dang and neighboring Kalinga areas, and there is substantial overlap in Ga’dang and Kalinga beadwork compositions. However, Ga’dang specimens of the best quality are consistently made of the tiniest beads anywhere, both translucent and opaque; and in greater masses. The collection of cowries to make a karaweweng represents long-duration persistence: shells acquired via exchanges between coastal and montane northern Luzon would have had to be sustained across decades (and across generations) to bring together nearly identical sizes, shapes, and coloration.

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