In July 2022, the team arrived in Tamban port with Father Eric, the Bicol Archaeological Project’s (BAP) primary community contact and a representative of the Catholic Church, and Earl Hernandez, a Bikolano and fellow BAP researcher. We supplemented ethnographic accounts produced by local scholar Pama (2014) with our own interviews conducted with the help of local contacts like Father Eric Bobis. All these sources in combination created a model of deforestation, erosion, and human ecological impacts during the American colonial era. Place-name analysis, settlement mapping, and historical and ethnographic accounts filled in ecological history with details about internal economic migration, settlement, and people’s relationships to landscape as reconfigured by industry.
We interviewed several residents; most were interested in what we were doing and, when told about the project, wanted to offer their perspective. The priests Father Eric and Father Serafin Amaro put residents at ease with their mere presence. The research would not have been possible without their work in communicating with residents and translating both ways, in real time. One elderly woman told us that her father had worked for the plywood company. At that time there were three streets running parallel to the sea, a tram, uniform company homes, a hospital, school, canteen, sex workers, a train platform on the pier, and large ships in the harbor. The entire surrounding area had been deforested, and in the 1960s, Typhoon Breda washed two of the three paved streets into the ocean.
A former clerk for the plywood company told us that many residents built their homes from reject material from the factory. After the company left in 1987, all the homes were dismantled and recycled by residents, and the steel from the railroad was pulled up and sold for scrap. Many workers resided in Barangay Homestead, a nearby settlement over which we later flew the drone based on this account. Near the end of our pedestrian survey, a child who had been following us led us to a home where we met a couple who lived in a house built atop an old concrete platform and surrounded by industrial remains.