They found exactly the same artifacts, that is, shell tools, including shell adzes, stone tools and slipped potsherds, some with impressed decoration inlaid with lime, and very similar C-14 dates, made again on shell (Ronquillo 1993). This appears to be an extremely important site.

In 1968 Karl Hutterer (1969) started a field program in southwestern Samar along the Basey River and its tributaries. He located ten caves and/or rock shelters. Surface collections included Paleolithic style core and flake tools. From excavations he recovered some blade tools made from prepared cores, the first such tools recovered in the Philippines. Three polished stone adzes were recovered, as was earthenware pottery with forms and decoration similar to the Kalanay Complex pottery. Other sites had large quantities of Chinese and Southeast Asian porcelain and stoneware ceramics, indicating international trade. This research was the subject of Hutterer’s Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Hawaii, which, unfortunately, has not been published.

Hutterer’s work in Samar led to a survey of Buad and Daram Islands, small islands off the coast of southwestern Samar, where a large number of blades and prepared cores were recovered from the surface (Scheans et al. 1970; Cherry 1978). Many of the blades with silica gloss along the cutting edge indicated use in cutting some varieties of grass. Hutterer’s Samar research also led to a field school in Samar for the Department of Anthropology, University of Hawaii, directed by David Tuggle. A preliminary research report on this project, edited by Tuggle and Hutterer (1972), was undertaken by the students from Hawaii. No final report has appeared.

A major problem for the study of Philippine prehistory is the popularity of ceramic collecting as the hobby of many wealthy Filipinos. Valuable ceramics and other artifacts were customarily buried with the dead in Southeast Asia and grave robbers were at their worst in the Philippines, locating cemeteries and looting them for their artifacts. The National Museum often found out about important sites after they had been systematically looted. One area with a high population in late prehistoric times and many cemeteries was the area surrounding Laguna de Bay. Leandro and Cecil Locsin were different sorts of collectors; realizing the damage done by looting, they had supported the excavation of the Santa Ana churchyard site. In 1967–1968 the Locsins supported a major excavation of three sites in Laguna and also supported the publication of a well-illustrated report on this work, which has yet to be published. The excavators were brought in from San Carlos University in Cebu. The two primary cultural horizons recovered, defined by the trade pottery of those periods, were of the Lower Sung and the Upper Sung/Yuan Dynasties of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Below the Lower Sung three burials of what has been called “the Iron Age in the Philippines” were recovered. Earthenware pottery and no foreign trade porcelains were associated with these burials, and for the first time in the Philippines cremation burials and a crematorium were found.

Warren Peterson started archaeological survey and excavation in the Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon in 1968 as his Ph.D. dissertation research at the University of Hawaii. In the southern end of the valley he excavated the Pintu Rock Shelter where he found a core and flake tool industry, with flakes the more common. It was the first time flakes of this type had been found in the Philippines. Associated with these flakes from the middle level and upward was coiled or ring-built pottery. The earliest pottery from this site has a C-14 date of about 1,500 b.c., while the date for the bottom level is about 2,000 b.c. He later moved to the east coast of Luzon where he located an open site with clear evidence of houses built directly on the ground, the first such reported in the Philippines. “Flake and blade stone tools were also found, as well as a polished trapezoidal adze. Pottery in both layers was coiled or ring-built; red slipping was common. Three C-14 dates from samples of the floor of the house, in the deeper layer, varied from about 1,500 to 3,300 b.c.” (Solheim 1974, 26–27).

Peterson continued working in the Philippines off and on and in 1978, while directing a field training program, he discovered the Payatas