Figure 1

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 did a survey of the town and took GPS points for a large concrete slab that was a component of the old rail platform and for a concrete foundation of a crane that was used to load and unload logs. Both structures were nestled between and beneath people’s homes and businesses. From an interview with Annie Cabral, captain of the barangay—head of the smallest political unit in the Philippines—we learned about the status of land reclamation in Tamban and subsequent erosion on the opposite bank, as well as the ongoing challenges facing development efforts in the barangay: expanding settlement, erosion, and flooding. We also learned that the rail line used to run along the river and bring in lumber from Lagonoy. Tebbe’s (1967) account corroborates the existence of a port at this location, near the first Cadwallader-Gibson logging camp, Camp Isarog, so named for its views of Mount Isarog. We conducted one drone flight over Tamban. The lidar data were not as clean as we would have liked due to the high humidity and visible water vapor in the air, but this scan still produced a detailed elevation model.

It is important to rely on local people’s definition of flooding, because the risk associated with seasonally rising waters can be subjective. Cabral indicated the elevation below which flood waters put homes and businesses at risk. The extent of flood risk became clearer when we combined this community-sourced flood elevation with the elevation model derived from the lidar scan. Using aerial photos and the orthomosaic of the town in ArcGIS, we calculated the total area of the town that included modern buildings and then the percentage of that area lying below the elevation at risk of flooding. We found that the flood plain extends to endanger 28.5% of the occupied area of Tamban.

Two days after our arrival in Tamban, Hernandez, Father Eric, and Meyer-Lorey visited Tandoc. We met up with local Catholic priest Father Serafin Amaro and conducted a ground survey, taking 32 GPS points of concrete and iron structures that belonged to Jacob Chetvernia’s Woodworks plywood operation. We circled the two artificial freshwater lakes built by the plywood company and examined the pier, which once was a wooden rail platform and is now a concrete promontory.

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.

Aerial spy photography collected by the United States in January 1945 covered part of the research area between modern-day San Vicente (Campo Cuatro) and Sagrada (Campo Seis). After gaining access to these photos from NARA, we created an orthomosaic of the overlapping images and georeferenced it to generate topographic data and trace visible sections of the rail line (Supplemental Figure 12).

In 1932 and 1933, a 24-year-old logging engineer Charles Tebbe identified inefficiencies at the Camp Isarog mill and set up a new mill site in Tandoc; while there he took many photos (see Figures 3–5; Supplemental Figures 1–10).

His travelogue and photos were bound into a single copy of a book, "Butuanan," held at UC Berkeley's Bancroft library.