
Les 
POPULAR SOLE N CH 
PONT HEY. 

DECEMBER, 1910 

THE ILONGOT OR IBILAO OF LUZON 
By Dr. DAVID P. BARROWS 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
oe 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,” “TIlongot” or “ Tlingit.” 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 Rio 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 
*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. 
