Tabon Caves

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On the lid of a burial jar taken from a Palawan cave, a passenger rides a small boat with his arms folded across his chest, his hands laid on his shoulders in exactly the pose Filipinos still use to compose the dead. Behind him a second figure leans forward on a steering paddle, ferryman to the first. A carved face rides the prow, watching the water ahead. The whole sculpture is scarcely larger than a spread hand, worked in earthenware nearly three thousand years ago and lifted from the dark of a limestone chamber in 1964. It is a picture of a crossing: the soul carried by boat across water to the world of the ancestors. It is also, so far as anyone has found, the oldest surviving image of that belief anywhere in the archipelago — a single gesture in clay that opens onto the whole cosmos of the people who made it.

The jar is the Manunggul Jar, and the cave is one of hundreds honeycombing a headland called Lipuun Point, on the southwestern coast of Palawan in the municipality of Quezon. Together they are known as the Tabon Caves, and they carry a weight out of all proportion to their size: this small promontory has become the deep-time cradle of Philippine prehistory, the place where the country’s story is measured not in the centuries since the galleons but in the tens of millennia before them.

The headland of caves

Lipuun Point is a spur of raised coral limestone jutting into the Sulu Sea, its cliffs eaten by weather and time into a warren of chambers, shelters, and passages. Of roughly two hundred and fifteen caves and rock shelters counted in the promontory, about twenty-nine have been explored and seven are open to visitors; the rest remain unentered or unstudied, sealed by rockfall or reserved from disturbance. The forest that covers the headland and the caves beneath it were set aside together as the Lipuun Point Reservation, so that the site is protected as a single living landscape rather than a scatter of holes in the rock.

The Tabon Cave complex at Lipuun Point, Quezon, Palawan, where raised limestone cliffs above the Sulu Sea are honeycombed with burial and habitation chambers. Jimaggro, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Systematic work on the caves began in the early 1960s under Robert B. Fox, the American-born chief of the anthropology division of the National Museum of the Philippines, who directed excavations across the complex between 1962 and 1966 alongside Filipino colleagues including the archaeologists Alfredo Evangelista and Manuel Santiago. What they found reset the clock on human presence in the islands. On 28 May 1962, from the chamber that gives the whole complex its name — Tabon Cave itself — Fox’s team recovered the fossilized fragments of a human skullcap, together with the jawbones of at least three individuals. The skull belonged to a young adult, and the frontal bone is most likely that of a woman; the remains have nonetheless entered the literature under the conventional name Tabon Man. Recorded as Tabon Man, the skullcap is dated to about 16,500 years ago, give or take two thousand — among the oldest anatomically modern human remains then known from the archipelago.

That was not the floor of the deposit. Charcoal from the cave’s occupation hearths carbon-dates its use across tens of thousands of years, and a re-excavation of Tabon Cave in the year 2000 recovered a fragment of tibia dated to roughly forty-seven thousand years ago, with a wide margin of some eleven thousand years on either side. If that reading holds, it pushes the human presence at Lipuun Point back nearly to the outer edge of modern humanity’s spread through island Southeast Asia. The date rests, however, on a single bone fragment and carries a large uncertainty, and it should be held more loosely than the well-attested skullcap: it marks a plausible antiquity rather than a settled one. Across the 1962 and 2000 seasons together, some four hundred and eighty-three human bone specimens were recovered from the complex.

These are ancestral remains, and they are treated as such. They are held by the National Museum of the Philippines and regarded by present-day Filipinos as the physical trace of the earliest people of the islands, handled with the respect owed to the dead rather than displayed as curiosities. The deep-time significance of Tabon is inseparable from that duty of care, and it governs how the remains are studied, stored, and shown.

The caves were a place of habitation before they were a place of burial. The deposits Fox worked through held the ordinary residue of lives lived in the rock over an immense span: chipped stone flake tools, the bones of the animals eaten, ash and charcoal from fires banked against the dark. The record here is read almost wholly in the register of archaeology — there is no chronicle and no epic to set beside it, only the layered ground and what it can be made to say. That is the source-distance proper to a site this old: for the very earliest chapters of the Philippine past, the evidence is not a text but a stratum, and the confidence any claim can carry is the confidence its dated bone or charcoal will bear. It is a discipline of patience, and Tabon rewards it with a run of human presence stretching back through the last Ice Age and beyond.

The caves were not only a place of the living. In several chambers Fox’s teams uncovered a burial tradition of extraordinary richness. In nearby Manunggul Cave, in 1964, the National Museum expedition excavated Chamber A, part of a Metal-Age jar-burial practice represented across the complex by well over a thousand earthenware vessels — some counts run past fifteen hundred. Alongside the jars lay imported stoneware and porcelain from the Chinese trade of the Song and Yuan periods, evidence that this remote headland sat on the sea-roads that laced the region together long before any European chart named them. But the object that would make Manunggul Cave famous was one jar, and one lid.

The boat that carries the soul

The Manunggul Jar is a secondary-burial vessel. In a secondary burial the dead are not committed to the ground once and left; the body is first allowed to decay, and then the cleaned bones are gathered up and re-interred a second time, here inside a great painted jar. The practice is not a matter of tidiness. It treats death as a passage with stages — a first crossing out of the living body, a period of transition, and a final settling of the bones into their lasting home. The jar is the house built for that last stage.

The Manunggul Jar in the National Museum of Anthropology, Manila; its lid bears the two figures of the boat-of-the-dead. Julan Shirwod Nueva, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

It is a large jar — about sixty-six and a half centimeters tall and half a meter across — and it is beautiful. Its shoulders are painted in red hematite with curvilinear scrolls that run in bands around the upper body and over the lid, reading unmistakably as ocean waves; the whole vessel is shaped and finished with a control that argues long tradition behind it. On top sits the lid, and on the lid the boat. Two human figures share the little vessel. One rides at the stern, both hands closed on the loom of a steering paddle, the ferryman who works the crossing. Before him sits the passenger, arms folded across the chest and hands laid on the shoulders — the posture that Philippine custom reserves for the body of the dead. A third face is carved onto the prow, gazing forward over the water the boat is made to cross. Dated by its context to somewhere between about 890 and 710 BCE, described in the museum record as the Manunggul Jar, it is the keystone of what the caves preserve.

Read in the frame of the people who made it, the lid is a map. The dead do not vanish; they travel. And they travel the way an island, seafaring people would naturally imagine any long journey — by boat, over water, with someone to steer. The image belongs to a conviction spread widely across the Austronesian world, from the Philippines through the Indonesian archipelago and out into the Pacific: that the ship is a vehicle for the spirit, that the passage between this world and the next is a voyage by sea. The Manunggul lid is among the earliest material witnesses to that belief anywhere it is held. The waves painted on the jar’s body are not decoration alone; they are the water the little boat is crossing, and the jar itself is the vessel within the vessel.

What is it that the ferryman carries? Later Filipino thought, recorded in the colonial dictionaries and alive in the languages still, drew a careful distinction inside the person. There is the body; there is the ginhawa, the breath and life-force that animates it; and there is the kaluluwa, the soul proper, the part that departs on the journey when the breath stops. The paddling figure and his folded-armed passenger give that last idea a face nearly three thousand years old — the kaluluwa being ferried to the world of the ancestors, the anito who have gone before and now watch over the living from the other side. Among the lowland Tagalog and the Visayans of the central islands alike, the dead who completed such a passage did not cease to matter; they became presences to be honored and consulted, mediated by the priestess-healers — the catalonan among the Tagalog, the babaylan among the Visayans — whose office was precisely to keep the road between the living and the spirits open. The remote sky-creator Bathala had made the world and withdrawn to his high realm; it was the nearer spirits, the ancestors and the powers of place, whom one actually spoke to, and the boat on the jar is the beginning of one such passage into their company.

The boat does not stand alone. Other jars from the complex carry incised and painted designs of the same family — scrolls, waves, the running curvilinear patterns that mark a shared artistic and ritual world — and the practice of secondary burial in decorated earthenware links Tabon to a broad Metal-Age tradition across the islands and the wider maritime region. What the Manunggul lid does that the others do not is make the belief explicit: where its neighbors imply the crossing in the wave-scrolls on their shoulders, it sets two figures in an actual boat and hands one of them a paddle. It is the moment a widely held idea about the fate of the soul was given a body in clay, and it survived because it was buried in a cave that the sea could not reach and the centuries did not disturb.

Seen this way the Tabon Caves are less a graveyard than a diagram of a cosmos. The living tended their dead through a crossing that had to be paddled; the boat — the defining technology of a people whose world was made of islands and the water between them — was the natural image for the passage between worlds. The caves held the bones; the jar held the picture of where the person inside them had gone.

Cradle and shadow

Fox judged the Manunggul lid a work “perhaps unrivaled in Southeast Asia, the work of an artist and a master potter,” and the estimate has held. The jar was declared a National Treasure of the Philippines under the museum designation item 64-MO-74, and it now anchors the collection of the National Museum of Anthropology in Manila, the single most reproduced object of the country’s prehistory. The wider complex has become the touchstone of the national story, popularly styled the “Cradle of Philippine Civilization” — a founding image reaching back past the Spanish conquest of the 1560s and 1570s into a past the conquest could neither reach nor erase.

That reach is not confined to museum halls. The boat-of-the-dead traveled into the pockets of the country. On the reverse of the New Design series one-thousand-peso note, issued by the central bank from December 1991, the Manunggul Jar’s lid appeared beside the Banaue face of the Ifugao rice terraces as an emblem of the nation’s deep heritage; the design gave way only when the New Generation Currency series, launched from 2010, replaced it with new imagery, and the older note was demonetized in 2018. Documented among the design elements of the thousand-peso note, the soul-boat was for a generation a thing Filipinos handled every day without always knowing what it showed. It remains a fixture of school textbooks and national iconography, and the promontory that produced it is guarded as the Lipuun Point Reservation, entered on UNESCO’s Tentative List in 2006 as the Tabon Cave Complex and all of Lipuun and declared a National Cultural Treasure by the National Museum in 2011.

The belief-world the jar hints at, though, has a shadow over it, and any honest account has to name it. The Spanish conquest that began with Miguel López de Legazpi at Cebu in 1565 and reached Manila in 1571 brought with it a program of Christianization that set out to replace the old religion wholesale. The creator-name Bathala was folded into the Christian God, a substitution that let the friars preach in a familiar word while emptying it of its former world. The anito — the ancestral and nature spirits at the heart of daily devotion — were denounced as idols and their images burned. And the priestess-healers who served them, the babaylan and catalonan, overwhelmingly women or feminized men, were recast by Spanish and later authorities as witches and as aswang: the demonization of an indigenous, largely female religious authority, meant to discredit the office by making a monster of the one who held it. The horror-movie aswang of later Philippine folklore is downstream of that colonial slander — a once-sacred category of mediator turned, by the extirpators and then by the entertainment that inherited their vocabulary, into a thing that eats the dead rather than tends them. It is a historiographic problem to be marked, not a judgment to be adopted; the terms were the conquerors’, and they are named here as theirs.

Yet the soul-journey the Manunggul figures embody is not a dead paganism. It is continuous with a religion still practiced. The anito and the diwata, the guardian spirits of ancestor and place; the babaylan legacy now reclaimed by contemporary Filipino scholars and communities; the syncretic folk-Catholic devotions that fold saint and spirit together at holy mountains like Mount Banahaw and in the fertility once entrusted to a power such as Lakapati — all of these are present-tense, living faith rather than survivals from a closed past. The little boat on the jar is one end of a thread that has not been cut. The Filipinos who paddle their dead across water in a burial rite, or who compose a body with its hands folded on the chest, are doing in the twenty-first century what the potter of Manunggul pictured in the ninth century before it.

And so the caves keep two things at once. They keep the bones of the earliest islanders, held now as ancestors under the museum’s care and the country’s respect. And they keep, on the lid of one jar, the picture of where those islanders believed the dead were bound. The ferryman still leans on his paddle; the passenger still rides with folded arms toward a shore his people have not stopped imagining. The crossing the jar depicts was old when it was made, and it is not finished being made now.

→ Related: The Tagalog · The Visayans · The Ifugao · Bathala · Lakapati · Aswang · Bakunawa · Maria Makiling · Mount Makiling · Mount Banahaw · Ifugao Rice Terraces