Agusan and Caraga

Who holds it

Title

No overall chief: the datus (chiefs) and elders of the river-mouth and valley communities, each answering for their own people

Since

not pinned

Born

not known

Family

not known

Confidence

low

Nothing is written about the rulers or headmen of this country for 1200. The structure is read from geography and from ethnography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

What it holds

• The marsh villages
• The gold creeks of the Diwata range
• The Pacific coast landings

Allies and rivals

Butuan sells to them and buys their gold (Butuan).

How things stand that morning

Not described for 1200; the villages are presumed to be farming, fishing and selling what the rivers and forests give.

Wealth

Placer gold, forest goods; no figures.

Military

Not known; boats, spears, shields and blowpipes in the later record. No numbers.

Threats

• Feuds and raiding between villages
• Flood, drought or fire
• A change in the trade that comes by sea

Places of note

• Agusan marsh: Flooded basin on the middle river.
• Diwata range: Gold range between the river and the Pacific.
• Tandag: Pacific coast town (a later name).
• Surigao: Strait town (a later name).

Where the sources disagree

• The ethnic names used here (Ibanag, Ilocano, Tagalog, Bisaya, Maranao and the rest) are later labels, most of them recorded by the Spanish from the 1560s on; the ethnic map of 1200 is not known. The word barangay (a community under a datu) is also of the Spanish record.
• The campaign board entry ids agusan-marsh and diwata-gold-range are carried by the Butuan realm record; this province is the hill and coast country round it.

Evidence: Geography and later ethnography only; no text of the period describes this country.

"The campaign board" is OMNIA's working map. These notes record where its earlier claims were checked against the sources.

On the map: A rough outline of the people's country; the real extent of any village group in 1200 is not known, and nothing here is a border.