ACCORDING to the historical data and personal accounts that I gathered from local residents living in Sitio Taguanao, Barangay Indahag this city and in Sitio Guisoc, Barangay Pualas, Baungon, Bukidnon, there are four possible sources of those numerous skulls and mandibles that were recently unearthed in those places.

The first source could be from the prehistoric period. In 1976, Dr. Erlinda Burton of Xavier University excavated in Huluga Cave. She sent bone samples from the cave to the United States for Aspartic Acid Racemization. The results showed that the bones were around 350 AD. She believed that the cave was used as a burial site during the Metal Age or possibly in the early Neolithic Period.

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However, there is a much older archaeological burial site that was discovered in 1990 in Panhutogan Primary School, Placer, Surigao del Norte. It was a formal burial site whose bones were carbondated and is from 140 AD to 1770 AD. The site was continuously used for 1,630 years. The archaeology team was headed by Dr. Eusebio Dizon of the National Museum and Dr. Leslie Bauzon of UP.

Then, we have the oral and written accounts of the great flood and the cholera epidemic in Cagayan in 1916. The death toll was so great that the municipal officials decided to bury the cholera victims in mass graves around the Indahag area

Mrs. Linda Caragos, whose grandfather, Dr. Jose Marfori owned a big tract of land in Taguanao, told me that during World War II, a plane carrying Japanese soldiers crashed in that area and that there were no survivors. The dead were buried in a farmer's field and the bones were later dug up and placed in sacks.

Former Barangay Chief Ernesto Edrote of Macasandig also remembers that as a kid, he used to go with his family to light a candle on an unmarked grave of a relative in Taguanao. The man died along with other older evacuees died of natural causes during the war.

In my previous column, I wrote of seeing human bones that were placed in two sacks near an open pit in Guisoc that is around three kilometers away from the Huluga Complex. Professor Samuel Briones, a National Museum deputy for Mindanao and I examined the bones that were taken in that area recently. He pointed to a tooth that had an unmistakable nicotine stain in it. Some bones had thick deposits of collagen which means that the person died only a few years ago.

Several landowners in Guisoc told me that a notorious bandit named Raul Bacarro once roamed in the Indahag and Guisoc area. He murdered several people and dumped his victims near the place where the pit is located. A paramilitary man from Macasandig later killed Bacarro. This same area was also where there are shallow graves of those persons that were killed by the NPAs who were operating in Bukidnon. All these grisly killings happened in the 1980s.

Though I can perfectly understand the excitement and enthusiasm over this new archaeological site, as a graduate student of UP-ASP, my advice is to do a lot of research for this will help greatly when a full-scale archaeological excavation is done.

Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn, the two eminent archaeological writers whose book "Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice" (2008) now in its fifth edition is a must read in ASP wrote this profound and sagacious observation:

If we are to have an adequate perception of our place as human beings in this modern world, the past matters, It is where we came from, and it has determined what we are. For that reason, it is necessary for us to set our faces against the lunatics and the fringe archaeologists who seek (sometimes from their own gain, but sometimes from their inability to think straight) to confuse and corrupt our view of the past.

The objection to what they write is not simply that it differs from the conventional archaeological wisdom. No one has a monopoly of the truth not even the archaeologist. The objection is that such works gloss over the difficulties and fail to submit their evidence to the kind of scientific scrutiny that we have been advocating in this volume.

Anyone who has read this book and who understands how archaeology proceeds, will already see why such writings are a snare and a delusion.

The real antidote is a kind of healthy skepticism: to ask Where is the evidence? "Knowledge advances by asking questions, and there is no better way to disperse the lunatic fringe that by asking difficult questions, and looking skeptically as the answers."

TouchT!