Lobo before the Spanish

Archaeological exploration of eastern Batangas, including Lobo, recorded twenty burial and settlement sites, some yielding material datable to the Developed Metal Age between 100 and 400 AD, the fifteenth century, and the late 1800s. Local tradition adds pre-Spanish Chinese traders, the arrival of the Bornean datus, and a founding settler named Gat Bahaghari.

Eastern Batangas was, for most of the twentieth century, archaeologically ignored. Research from the early 1900s concentrated on the southwest of the province, and the eastern towns were passed over as a matter of research agenda rather than because there was nothing there. When a survey was eventually run across San Juan, Lobo, Taysan and Padre Garcia, it recorded twenty burial and settlement sites, with datable material falling into three periods: the Developed Metal Age of roughly 100 to 400 AD, the fifteenth century, and the late nineteenth. People have been burying their dead in this landscape for something close to two thousand years.

What tradition adds

Local tradition fills in what the survey does not. Before the Spanish, the account collected from town elders describes thick forest with no permanent name and no settled community, worked by hunters who moved through it rather than living in it. It also records a belief that a group of Chinese traders stayed here before the Spanish period, based on remains unearthed from a hill in Barangay Sawang — a small burial ground identified as Chinese from the kitchenware found alongside the graves.

The arrival of the ten Bornean datus under Datu Puti, placed by tradition in the middle of the thirteenth century, is given as the turn toward permanent settlement. The figure who founded Lobo in these accounts is Gat Bahaghari, who came for the view and the fertility of the soil and built on the top of a hill overlooking the sea — high ground chosen so that pirates could be seen coming. That hill is now the municipal cemetery, north of the Poblacion.

Masaguitsit

Below it, on the west side, ran the streams the settlers used to irrigate. The word for them was sumasagitsit, the sound of running water. Asked where they came from, the farmers bringing their surplus down to trade said sumasagitsit, and the name stuck to the place. It became Masagitsit, and then Barangay Masaguitsit.

What is verified and what is tradition

The archaeological survey is VERIFIED. The Chinese burial site, Datu Puti, Gat Bahaghari and the Masaguitsit etymology are TRADITION, collected from community elders in the 1951 Historical Data programme and reproduced since. They are recorded here as tradition, neither promoted to fact nor discarded — the collection process is itself part of the story.

Related

The history of Lobo, the most isolated town in Batangas, and Lobo in the Second World War.