
106 PEOPLES OF THE PHILIPPINES 
Iron Industry. All the peoples in the Philippines 
use iron, and no traces of a distinctive age of stone or 
copper have ever been found. Even the Negritos, 
although they do not work metal, may be said to be 
living in an iron age condition, because they possess 
knives obtained in trade from their neighbors. 
There is every possibility that the islands may have 
been occupied before metals were known. This would 
be the period or condition of culture corresponding to 
the stone age of many other parts of the world. The 
reasons why no definite evidences of such a primitive 
type of culture have been found in the Philippines may 
be several. There has been very little archaeological 
exploration. The natural density of vegetation would 
tend to conceal such remains as there might be. And 
finally, conditions in a typically tropical environment 
are not such as to favor the development of a distinctive 
stone culture. Bamboo, for instance, yields fairly 
serviceable spears, knives, and scrapers with but little 
shaping. It probably requires less technical skill to 
work into useful implements than stone. It is true that 
stone might well be employed to fashion the bamboo in 
such a nascent culture stage; but if so, a split cobble, 
made on occasion and immediately discarded, would 
easily answer all requirements, and thus come to leave 
no traces, or but the slightest, of the use of stone. At 
any rate, the traces have not been found; and so far 
back as our knowledge extends, all Philippine tribes 
have enjoyed the use of at least some metal tools, either 
of their own or of foreign manufacture. 
A division can however be made between the native 
peoples having so little iron that it was mainly their 
utensil-making tools which were of that material, and 
the more advanced groups that possessed a greater 
abundance of the metal. In the former class there 

