[Time Trowel] What a Tao boat from Taiwan to Batanes tells us about Filipino history

TROWEL

A trowel (/ˈtraʊ.əl/), in the hands of an archaeologist, is like a trusty sidekick – a tiny, yet mighty, instrument that uncovers ancient secrets, one well-placed scoop at a time. It’s the Sherlock Holmes of the excavation site, revealing clues about the past with every delicate swipe.

In one Tao story, a boy on Orchid Island finds a crate washed ashore. Inside is a girl from Batanes. Her father had placed her in the sea during a famine, hoping the current would carry her to another life. The boy brings her home. She marries into the community. Their children become ancestors.

In another story, an Ivatan man travels north in search of a widow on Orchid Island. He marries her, returns with her to Batanes, then comes back to Orchid Island when famine strikes. Other stories speak of trade in cowhide, gold, hooks, yam, and fish. They speak of friendship between Tao and Ivatan men, and of quarrels that ended visits across the Bashi Channel.

These are histories carried in story, memory, boat-building, language, and kinship.

When a Tao vessel crossed from Lanyu to Batanes on June 16, 2026, it renewed a relationship that already had its own stories and obligations. The Tao and Ivatan already had accounts of travel, marriage, exchange, famine, friendship, conflicts, and disconnection. Their languages remain more than 80 percent mutually intelligible. Their elders continue to recognize kin across the water.

Interrupted by colonialism

That relationship was not lost because people forgot each other. It was interrupted because colonialism did what colonialism often does. It turned corridors into borders. Batanes came under Spanish rule. Orchid Island was pulled into Qing, Japanese, and later Republic of China (Taiwan) administrations. The Bashi Channel, once a route, became a line between states, enforced by empires and the paperwork of sovereignty.

The June 2026 voyage was not a return to an abstract Austronesian past. It was a renewal of Tao–Ivatan relations.

Filipino readers know this problem well because we have been trained to love origin stories. We ask where we came from, who arrived first, and whether we are Malay, Austronesian, Asian, Pacific, or something else. These questions can help us think across islands and histories, but they can also become traps. They make us search for one label when history is often made through movement, marriage, trade, conflict, and return.

Philippine media leaned heavily on the phrase “Austronesian connection,” sometimes as if “Austronesian” were a people rather than a language family. Although the term has value in linguistics, when used as a reference for living communities, it can reduce named peoples to a model. Thus, the Tao and Ivatan are not compelling because they prove an Austronesian model. They are compelling because they remember each other.

Taiwanese media offered a useful contrast. Some reports still used “Austronesian,” especially through the Chinese term 南島, literally “Southern Islands.” But the emphasis often fell elsewhere. Many reports use ancestral sea route, shared heritage, maritime exchange, old route, or renewed contact. That framing begins with relationship, not classification. It lets the Tao and Ivatan remain Tao and Ivatan.

People separated from their histories

We encounter the same issue in Sqoyaw, Heping District, Taichung, where we currently work in the mountains of central Taiwan.

In Sqoyaw, Heping District, our collaboration with the Tayal community begins with a similar question. What happens when people are separated from their histories, not because they forgot them, but because colonial and state systems made those histories harder to reach?

The Tayal of Sqoyaw did not lose their past. It was made harder to reach. Under Japanese colonial rule, policing, relocation, road construction, and surveillance reorganized Indigenous life, moving communities, controlling trails, and changing settlement patterns. Places that carried Tayal meaning were folded into the machinery of administration.

Later Taiwan state policies carried this disruption forward, placing Indigenous lands under forestry programs, development plans, conservation rules, and administrative categories that often treated the landscape as empty or available for management. Land that held memory was recast as state land, old settlements as archaeological sites, and ancestral places as resources.

Through our archaeological and ethnographic collaboration in Sqoyaw, we hope to work against that erasure.

Tayal stewardship

The survey area is not an empty mountain landscape waiting for experts to assign meaning. It is a place where Tayal memory, oral history, land use, and archaeology meet. Our findings suggest multiple occupations. Terraces point to long-term cultivation and slope management. Piled stone structures may be former house areas, retaining walls, field boundaries, or other signs of settlement. Possible stone slab burials raise questions about earlier occupations, mortuary practice, and the relationship between present Tayal communities and earlier peoples who lived in the same landscape.

These findings remain preliminary. They require long-term study and community discussion. The point is not to turn Sqoyaw into another headline about “lost ancestors” or “mysterious ruins.” That language treats Indigenous places as discoveries only when outsiders document them.

Sqoyaw calls for another approach. It asks us to read the landscape as history without taking it away from the people who continue to live with it.

For the Tayal, stewardship is not an environmental catchphrase. It is practice shaped by movement, hunting, planting, gathering, naming, and responsibility. The forest is not just biodiversity. The terraces are not just agricultural features. Stones are not just architecture. They are part of a land-history connecting people, ancestors, crops, water, animals, and spirits through obligation.

Tayal stewardship also does not require a simple story of identity. The Sqoyaw landscape holds many histories. Some may be Tayal. Some may point to earlier or neighboring communities. Some may reflect colonial relocation or later state programs. These histories do not cancel each other. They show that Indigenous landscapes are not frozen in time. They are places of movement, conflict, adaptation, and return.

No human history is pure

The Tao voyage to Batanes and our work in Sqoyaw may seem to belong to different worlds. One is maritime, one is mountain. One crosses a channel, the other walks terraces and stone features. But both unsettle the same assumption. Indigenous histories are not waiting to be authenticated by academic labels or media shorthand.

The Tao and Ivatan do not become real because some call them “Austronesian.” The Tayal of Sqoyaw do not become historical because archaeology finds terraces, stone piles, and possible burials. Their histories did not begin when scholars named or documented them.

This is also a caution for the Philippines. We often turn Indigenous peoples into symbols of national origins. We ask them to stand for a past before Spain, America, migration, mixture, and the nation-state. We want an intact past because it is easier to celebrate. We want a pure past because it is easier to claim.

But no human history is pure. The search for purity is not decolonization. It is another form of control.

Indigenous histories are important because they show how communities lived through change without surrendering their memories and relations. Identity can survive movement. Kinship can survive borders. Landscapes can hold more than one history. A people can be Indigenous without being frozen in time.

A boat can cross a border. A terrace can hold a memory. A stone can refuse silence. – Rappler.com

Stephen B. Acabado is professor of anthropology at the University of California-Los Angeles. He directs the Ifugao and Bicol Archaeological Projects, research programs that engage community stakeholders. He grew up in Tinambac, Camarines Sur.