CHAPTER 3 TRADE AND COMMERCE
And tree houses
 Visayans who practiced trades like blacksmithy, boat building, or
pot making were professionals in the sense of being
compensated for specialized skills. Markets for their wares and
services were limited; most men did their own carpentry and
their wives wove their own cloth.
 It appears that all either farmed or belonged to a farming family,
including fishermen, even members of the datu class. But there
were clearly those who practiced their crafts full time—experts
like shipwrights or goldsmiths.
IRONWORKING
 Blacksmiths were called panday or more accurately,panday sa
puthaw or workers in iron.
 Smithing was considered the noblest profession,probably
because only the wealthiest datus had the means to import the
raw materials.
 Iron itself had actually been produced in the Philippines in
ancient times.
 Iron slag has been recovered in considerable quantities from
archaeological
sites,including Visayan graves,and slag is normally a waste product of iron
smelting and refining.
 Bolo-the most important tool manufactured, repaired, or
retempered by the blacksmiths.
 Dohong or Dayopak-the ordinary one
 Tuwad-a heavier one for woodcutting
 Bako or Bantok-one with a curved blade for weeding or
cultivating
 Pisaw-one with a short blade and long handle to be pressed
under the arm or against the ground with the foot to leave both
hands free for stripping rattan.
WOODWORKING
 Carpenters cut their own timber, carefully observing accepted
nature lore in selecting it.
 Different species were felled during different phases of the
moon; some were believed to be more solid on the eastern side,
and “male” trees were always stronger than “females” of the
same species.
 All carpentry and house construction were done by skillful
joinery without saws or nails.
 Plates, bowls, spoons, and ladles, urns called bohon, coffins and
chests of all sizes were hewn from single blocks of wood, and
often decorated with fine carvings.
 Rough leaves of the hagopit tree or bin palm-used as sandpaper
or wood rasps
 Tough tail of the bisol ray fish or hide of the dahonan-served to
smooth even the hardest woods.
ARCHITECTURE
 The Visayan word for house was balay; whence kabalayan was a
settlement; magkabalay, a man and wife; and minalay meant
married.
 There were basically three types—permanent wooden structures
that might be called :
1. Town houses
- occupied by datus
2. Cottages built of light materials near the fields
-occupied by ordinary people
3.
-occupied only in time of war.
 Houses were elevated off the ground on posts and dominated by
steep roofs.
 The large town houses were supported on tall hardwood pillars
(harigi, or togbong if supporting the ridgepole, toko if only
reaching floor level). There were five to ten on a side, planted
deep in the ground with some valuable (sanag) buried under the
first one, so sturdy and incorruptible that some were known to
survive decay and typhoon for two or three generations.
 The floor (salog) was divided into two sections (puta), one
slightly higher than the other, by a squared beam (puthanan)
running lengthwise, and was made of bamboo, rattan, or cane
strips lashed together on top of a wooden grill. Both the grill and
the rattan strips were called buklag, and were loose enough to
permit liquids to run through—and noisy enough to keep
respectful house members off it while the datu was sleeping.
CROSS SECTION
 Finer details of Visayan architecture are revealed by their special
terms. Hagdan, for example, was a house ladder or stairway;
balitang, one rung or step; and alnntaga, a landing; but lugdog
was a single bamboo used as a ladder with stubs of branches left
on; and salugsog was a split-bamboo ladder for house dogs.
 A ruling datu had the largest house in the community. Similar
grandeur was forbidden other datus: to construct a house large
enough to entertain the whole community was in itself a form of
competition amounting to lese majesty.
 Similar grandeur was forbidden other datus: to construct a
house large enough to entertain the whole community was in
itself a form of competition amounting to lese majesty.
 Non-datus, on the other hand, lived in cottages built of light
materials ready to be moved every few years to be near shifting
swiddens.
 Tree houses were occupied only in time of war.
 They all disappeared after Spanish pacification, and so did those
datu mansions, as their public functions were taken over by
government buildings and churches.
BOAT BUILDING
 Visayan Boat Builders preferred Lawaan because it grew large
enough for a baroto 120 cm wide to be hewn out of a single
trunk.
A baroto was basically what the Spaniards called a canoa-a
dugout canoe.
damlog-simply a single piece
balasiyan-the smaller one
bilos-with bark washboards added for increased freeboard
tilimbaw or yahit-wooden planks were added
 The well-known barangay was an edge-pegged,plank-built boat
constructed on a kneel.
 Flat,open boats were daya or paya(literally,a half coconit
shell)but by the end of the century they were being called
champan from Chinese Sampan(three boards), a term
eighteenth-century Europeans would extend to any Chinese
vessel,even huge seagoing junks.
 Adyong-foreign vessels with high freeboard
 Karakoa-warship that was most celebrated Visayan vessel
 Sombol(on the prow) and Tongol(on the stern)-tall staffs of
brilliant plumage fore and aft as a sign of victory.
 All these vessels were designed for coastal seas full of reefs and
rocks,and inter island passages with treacherous currents.
POTTERY
 The Visayan potter’s craft was dihoon, and it was practiced by
female potters using not a potter’s wheel but the paddle-and-
anvil technique.
 The maninihon gathered the clay herself (kalot), kneaded it
(luyang), and then made a lump for each pot shaped like half a
coconut husk. She placed this over one hand holding inside it a
smooth round stone—the anvil (igsosool). She then thinned and
enlarged the lump of clay into pot shape by giving it light blows
on the outside with a paddle (dokol or dapi). (From the slapping
sound, pakpak or pikpik, she was also called mamarakpak or
mamirikpik.) Sticking the soft pot on a board or basin for easy
rotating, she widened and smoothed the lip with a wet cloth
(igigihit), and then left the finished pot to dry in the sun
 It was then fired (pagba) without a kiln, while still “green”
(lunhaw); and it was strictly tabu to make any clicking sounds
with the mouth within earshot, lest the pot make the same
sound by cracking. (If it cracked later from long use, however, it
might be mended with bayog bark.)
 The common cooking pot was daba or koron, or anglet or tanuk
in Panay.
 Bogoy was one with an especially wide mouth; and balanga, a
flat pan suitable for frying.
 The banga water jar was shaped like the porcelains preferred for
brewing and drinking pangasi.
 Dulang, a large plate with a foot, had a wooden counterpart by
the same name.
 The Visayans called large porcelain items-tadyaw.
 Thus anything valued at that price was tinadyaw; and when a
man was enslaved for inability to pay a fine, it might be
calculated in tinaradyaw.
 Naturally there was also a long list of names for specific types of
porcelain ware. Ordinary Chinese jars were ang-ang.
 The ones used for pangasi were gining.
 Abdan and lumbang were large ones.
 Linoping were the big Zheiiang wares with “ears” (handles) the
Portuguese called martabanas; they were called “linoping”
because they were decorated all over like Loping, men tattooed
all over.
 Tinampilak was a large black jar; tuytuy, a small black one; and
kabo, a Ming blue and white jarlet. Plates had even more names
according to their size, shape, and color, but all the big deep
ones were called kawkawun from kawkaw.
 Status symbols all, both jars and plates were displayed in a kind
of wickerwork holders on the house beams.
GOLDWORKING
 Gold is mentioned in early Spanish accounts more often than any
other one substance, evidence not only of their interest in it but
of the fact that they found it everywhere they went.
 But the Spanish were surprised at the low intensity of Visayan
mining operations: “They would rather keep it below the ground
than in cash- boxes,’’Juan Martinez (1567, 463) said, “because
since they have w'ars, they can steal it in the house but not in
the ground.”
 The Visayans called gold bulawan and fine gold himulawan,
presumably from bulaw, red or rosy, a color they often produced
artificially with porog, ochre. Though they had touchstones
(sanitran) to test its quality, most men could estimate its content
on sight, and they carried little scales and weights around with
them in a special pouch to make spot purchases.
 The weights were various kinds of seeds or beans, based on a
little red one called bangati, but convertible to standard
Southeast Asian weights of the time—the mas, the kupnng (0.25
mas), and the tael or tahil (16 mas), which was basing in Visayan.
The Visayans, however, reckoned three different kinds of basing
according to the quality of its gold content—labingsiam worth
12 Spanish reals, labingwalo worth 10 or 11, and labingpito, only
9.
 As Alcina said a century later, “one who knows how to make
them today is hard to find.” Alcina arrived in the Visayas in 1634,
and at that time noted that the number of local jewelers had
increased but that the quality of their goldwork had declined.
Alcina would not be the last person to see a contrast between
the level of Visayan culture and the perfection of their goldwork
WEAVING
 The Visayan word for cloth, blanket, or skirt was halnil, which
was woven on a backstrap loom by women or male
transvestites. The backstrap loom was so called because the
warp threads were supported, not in a permanent framework,
but in one continuous loop around a loom bar held in the
weaver’s lap by a strap behind her back, and another one
suspended from a house beam or tree branch as convenient.
 The front loom bar was called os-osan and it was coated with a
sticky black wax to keep the threads from slipping. Gikos were
the cords fastening the os-osan to a leather or wooden
backstrap (paliolan). The back loom bar was sablayan. Riding on
the warp was the reed or comb (salangtan), made of two parallel
rattan rods (tangkup) about three fingers apart, grooved to hold
the teeth (salisi) by wrapping a thread around it and in between
them; the reed could thus be opened by removing the thread in
order to insert it, comblike, over the upper set of warp threads.
 The weaving process required a hardwood batten (barila)
shaped like a dull sword as long as the fabric was wide.
 Weaving was a normal part of housekeeping, and women
supplied all their menfolk’s clothing: ladok was either a bachelor
or a shabbily dressed married man. In epic literature, this is the
pastime of even royal ladies, and heroes departing on amorous
adventures are ritually clothed with magical garments by their
mothers or sisters.
 Both cotton and abaca were pre- Hispanic exports: the Chinese
called Mindoro abaca ya-da, jute, in the thirteenth century. The
Spaniards quickly demanded cotton as tribute for sailcloth or
export to Mexico, and a year after Legazpi seized Manila, two
galleons sailed for Acapulco with 22,600 pesos worth of cloth
and 3,800 kilos of thread.
TEXTILES
 Habul means abaca cloth— Spaniards called it medrinaque
 The cleaned fibers were lanot-lanote to Spaniards-used as a
tribute for cordage
 Camay fiber was the finest and produced a light fabric called
sandulan