Eusebio Dizon

National Museum of the Philippines · Archaeological Studies Program

In the past decades, two antinomic hypotheses were developed in tropical prehistory. Scholars qualified tropical forests as “green deserts” and considered them inhospitable before the emergence of agriculture. Other archaeologists working in Southeast Asia rather thought that humans adapted so much to tropical forests that it impacted their technol...

This chapter is an overview of the Philippine prehistory and archaeology. It provides the different chronology and periodization in the reconstruction of Philippine prehistory from the very beginning of the archaeological awareness in the Philippine archipelago, and until the most recent one. New archaeological data found in the Philippines are inc...

Southeast Asia is one of the most significant regions in the world for tracing human prehistory over a period of 2 million years. Migrations from the African homeland saw settlement by Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis. Anatomically Modern Humans reached Southeast Asia at least 60,000 years ago to establish a hunter-gatherer tradition, adapting as...

The species Homo luzonensis has recently been described based on a set of dental and postcranial elements found at Callao Cave (Northern Luzon, Philippines) and dated to at least 50–67 ka. Seven postcanine maxillary teeth are attributed to this taxon, five of them belonging to the same individual (CCH6) and representing the holotype of H. luzonensi...

Perhaps the earliest migration and cultural change in the Philippine archipelago happened between 4500 and 4000 years ago, during the Neolithic Age. The initial crossing from the mainland was probably Austronesian speakers from southern Taiwan who traveled to Batanes and northern Luzon in the Philippines. After this first step, boat building techno...

A hominin third metatarsal discovered in 2007 in Callao Cave (Northern Luzon, the Philippines) and dated to 67 thousand years ago provided the earliest direct evidence of a human presence in the Philippines. Analysis of this foot bone suggested that it belonged to the genus Homo, but to which species was unclear. Here we report the discovery of twe...

For more than a half-century of research, the Philippine Paleolithic toolmaking has shown the persistence of the small-based flake tools. The bulk of the evidence comes from the excavation in caves and rock shelters. This paper presents the discovered open-sites in northern Mindanao that have large stone artifacts such as choppers and picks. These...

Pleistocene and Holocene lithic assemblages found in Southeast Asia are characterised by simple production techniques and a paucity of formal stone tools. This situation led some scholars to hypothesise that this situation reflected an adaptation of prehistoric human groups to the rainforest and that these simple stone tools had been mainly used to...

Tabon Cave is one of the few archaeological sites in island Southeast Asia which provided Upper Pleistocene Homo sapiens fossils. The published osteological material consists in one frontal bone and three mandibular fragments discovered during 1960 fieldworks as well as 11 new human remains unearthed during 2000-2001 excavations. However, recent ef...

Analysing residues on stone tools can reveal precise information about the activities that were conducted with the lithic tool and is a valuable technique to reconstruct past human behaviours. However, it is often difficult to assess the nature of the relationship between a residue and the artefact on which it is found. It is of great importance, t...

Tabon Cave is a key site for the understanding of modern human dispersals in the Philippine archipelago and Island Southeast Asia. Nestled in the karst landscape that borders the southwestern coast of Palawan, it has delivered the earliest confirmed Homo sapiens remains in the Philippines dating to the late Pleistocene, as far back as around 47 ka....

Prehistoric stone tools discovered in Southeast Asia contrast with what is found in the rest of the world: they are simple and their production techniques remained unchanged for millennia. To explain these unique characteristics, some scholars offered what is called the “bamboo hypothesis”: if SE Asian stone tools are simple it would be because the...

The discovery and underwater archaeological excavation, conducted jointly by the National Museum of the Philippines and a French outfit World Wide First (WWF) from 1991–93, on the Spanish Galleon San Diego, which sunk on 14 December 1600, offshore Fortune Island, Nasugbu, Batangas, Philippines, has brought to light some of possible historical mista...

The rock art sites in Peñablanca caves located in the province of Cagayan, northern Luzon, Philippines, were initially explored in 1976-1977. An estimate of more than 350 forms of geometric motifs, namely anthropomorphs, purported botanical emblems and many other indistinct and vague forms of drawings were documented on the walls of the rockshelter...

The authors compare pottery assemblages in the Marianas and the Philippines to claim endorsement for a first human expansion into the open Pacific around 1500 BC. The Marianas are separated from the Philippines by 2300km of open sea, so they are proposing an epic pioneering voyage of men and women, with presumably some cultivated plants but apparen...

Tabon Cave (Palawan, Philippines) is a key piece in the puzzle that is the story of early modern human dispersals in Southeast Asia, having delivered Homo sapiens remains that date back to at least around 35,000 years ago. The study of its palaeoenvironment would contribute towards understanding how early modern humans in tropical contexts interact...

Tabon Cave in Palawan, the Philippines is one of the most important sites for the understanding of regional prehistory in Southeast Asia. First excavated by Dr Robert Fox of the National Museum of the Philippines in the 1960s and later reinvestigated through a partnership between the National Museum of the Philippines and the Muséum national d’Hist...

This article by Tep Sokha presents the new discoveries by the Living in the Shadow of Angkor project of ceramics at the Phnom Khnang Peung (Cardamom Mountains) jar burials in Koh Kong, southern Cambodia, in which many Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai ceramics were found. These sites may be considered as links to maritime trade routes in the South and E...

The project reported on in this monograph has been concerned with the archaeology of the Batanes Islands, an archipelago that must have been settled quite early in the process of Austronesian dispersal from Taiwan southwards into the Philippines. A multi-phase archaeological sequence covering the past 4000 years for the islands of Itbayat, Batan, S...

"Pygmy populations" are recognized in several places over the world, especially in Western Africa and in Southeast Asia (Philippine "negritos," for instance). Broadly defined as "small-bodied Homo sapiens" (compared with neighboring populations), their origins and the nature of the processes involved in the maintenance of their phenotype over time...

Le site de la grotte de Tabon sur l’île de Palawan aux Philippines détient beaucoup de potentiel pour comprendre l’archéologie régionale et l’histoire paléoenvironnementale. Cependant, des problèmes de stratigraphie et de datation ont entravé l’établissement d’une géochronologie fiable sur ce site. Ceci est notamment dû à d’importants phénomènes de...

La renommée de la grotte de Tabon provient de la découverte dans les années 1960 d’un frontal et de deux fragments de mandibules d’Homo sapiens âgés de plus de 20 000 ans selon les découvreurs. En dépit de l’importance du site pour la compréhension des premières migrations d’Homo sapiens dans cette région du monde, la seule publication disponible c...

La renommée de la grotte de Tabon provient de la découverte dans les années 1960 d’un frontal et de deux fragments de mandibules d’Homo sapiens âgés de plus de 20 000 ans selon les découvreurs. En dépit de l’importance du site pour la compréhension des premières migrations d’Homo sapiens dans cette région du monde, la seule publication disponible c...

We have used electron probe microanalysis to examine Southeast Asian nephrite (jade) artifacts, many archeologically excavated, dating from 3000 B.C. through the first millennium A.D. The research has revealed the existence of one of the most extensive sea-based trade networks of a single geological material in the prehistoric world. Green nephrite...

Before its worldwide famous awakening in 1991, Mt Pinatubo volcano erupted between 800 and 500 year BP. The impacts of this little known eruption are progressively coming to light with the discovery of archaeological sites and the study of oral and geographical records. Recent archaeological excavations have shown that pyroclastic flows and lahar o...

Among the poor fossil record of Southeast Asian Upper Pleistocene Homo sapiens, the Tabon human remains [12] are frequently cited in the literature despite very scarce published palaeoanthropological data. A recent Filipino-French joint work confirmed the significance of the discoveries made in the 1960s: a frontal bone and two mandibular fragments...

Before its worldwide famous awakening in 1991, Mt Pinatubo volcano erupted around 500 year BP. The impacts of this little known eruption are progressively coming to light with the discovery of archaeological sites and the study of oral and geographical records. Recent archaeological excavations have shown that tephra fall, pyroclastic flows and lah...

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1988. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 436-462). Includes index. Microfilm.