Historical Background

Well before the Spanish era, southern Cordilleran miners exchanged gold in coastal villages for Chinese porcelains, raw iron, cloth, livestock, and other goods (Scott 1974; Keesing 1962). Highland-lowland commerce in all probability expanded through the Spanish period as the population erratically grew and as the mountain people responded to new trade opportunities. After the state mandated a tobacco monopoly in the 1780s, for example, highland-

ers soon began exporting large quantities of contraband tobacco to the lowlands (Scott 1974: 232).

In the late 1700s, Francisco Antolin, a Spanish friar stationed in a remote mission in the Magat Valley to the southeast of Buguias, documented an extensive and closely knit exchange system in the southern Cordillera. At that time, gold-mining communities typically procured food from nearby agricultural villages and even from the lowlands; the more prosperous mining districts regularly imported slaves from peripheral communities as well. Other villages specialized in manufacturing ironware and copperware, which, along with other handicrafts, were exchanged over long distances. Villages located athwart trade routes profited by charging tariffs on goods passing through their territories (Antolin 1789 [1970]).

At the time of Antolin's writings in the late eighteenth century, the southern Cordilleran trade network centered on two villages in the eastern cloud forest: Tucucan, located eleven kilometers east of Buguias, and its neighbor Tinoc, some twelve kilometers east-southeast of Buguias (Antolin 1789 [1970]). In this period, Buguias itself was noted for its production of copper vessels and iron tools and weapons, rather than for long-distance exchange (Scott 1974; Meyer 1890 [1975]; Semper 1862 [1975]). Sometime in the middle or late nineteenth century, however, Buguias gained ascendancy in transmontane trade—an abrupt shift evidently owing to the migration of Tinoc and Tucucan traders to the Buguias region, perhaps in response to Spanish incursions from the east. Virtually all presentday Buguias genealogies trace back to one wealthy Tucucan trader, Lumiaen, who migrated to Buguias during this period, and the Buguias people remember Lumiaen's son Basilio and his grandson Danggol as powerful merchants.