THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



DECEMBER, 1910 



THE ILONGOT OR IBILAO OF LUZON 



By Dk. DAVID P. BARROWS 



UNIVERSITY OP CALIFORNIA 



THE grewsome practise of taking human heads is particularly asso- 

 ciated with the Igorot peoples of the Cordillera of Luzon. These 

 all engage in it or have done so until recently. But to-day the most 

 persistent and dreaded headhunters are neither Igorot nor inhabitants 

 of the Cordillera; they are a wild, forest-dwelling people in the broken 

 and almost impenetrable mountain region formed by the junction of 

 the Sierra Madre range with the Caraballo Sur. They have been called 

 by different names by the peoples contiguous to them on the north, west 

 and south, " Italon," " Ibilao," "Ilongot" or " Ilungut." The last 

 designation would for some reasons be the preferred, but "Ibilao," or 

 as it is quite commonly pronounced locally through northern Nueva 

 Ecija, " Abilao," has perhaps the widest use. 1 



There are no early records of these people and until late in his rule 

 the Spaniard knew almost nothing of them. In the latter half of the 

 eighteenth century, the valley of the Magat was occupied and the mis- 

 sion of Ituy founded, out of which came the province of Nueva Vizcaya, 

 with its converted population of Gaddang and Isinay. To reach Ituy 

 from the south the trail followed up the valley of the Eio Pampanga 

 almost to its sources and then climbed over the Caraballo Sur to the 

 headwaters of the Magat. On this trail along the upper waters of the 

 Pampanga grew up several small mission stations, Pantabangan and 

 Karanglan, with a population of Pampanga and Tagalog people drawn 

 from the provinces to the south. After more than a hundred years 

 these small towns are still almost the only Christian settlements in 



1 The report of these people under different names has been the cause of 

 the belief that they were so many separate peoples. Professor F. Blumentritt 

 makes this mistake. " Versuch einer Ethnographie der Philippinen," p. 33 ; 

 " List of Native Tribes of the Philippines," translated in Smithsonian Report 

 for 1899. 



VOL. LXXVII. — 36. 



