Qualla: Tabon Caves

Tabon Caves: Introduction

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Felix A. Madriñan, CC BY-SA 4.0. The caves are named for a bird. The Tabon scrubfowl, a ground-nesting megapode that once thrived on the limestone headland of Lipuun Point, gave its name to a place where humans have sheltered, worked, buried their dead, and marked their presence for at least 50,000 years. That makes the Tabon Caves in Quezon, Palawan, the oldest known site of human habitation in the Philippines, the place the country calls its cradle of civilization. Two hundred fifteen caves honeycomb the point, carved by millennia of rain and tide into limestone formations that date back 25 million years to the Lower Middle Miocene. Of those caves, twenty-nine have been explored. Seven are open to visitors. The rest keep their secrets in the dark.

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Image: Felix A. Madriñan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tabon Caves: The Man Who Opened the Caves

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philip Maise, Public domain. Between 1962 and 1966, American anthropologist Robert B. Fox led a team from the National Museum of the Philippines into the Tabon cave system and emerged with discoveries that rewrote the archipelago's prehistory. The most famous find was the Tabon Man, a fragment of a skullcap ...

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Image: Philip Maise | Public domain

Tabon Caves: The Jars of the Dead

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philip Maise, CC BY-SA 3.0. Among the most striking finds at Tabon are the jar burials. The caves yielded hundreds of burial jars, ceramic vessels in which the bones of the dead were placed after the flesh had decomposed or been removed. The most celebrated is the Manunggul Jar, a secondary burial vessel da...

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Image: Philip Maise | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tabon Caves: A Museum Under Guard

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jimaggro, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Lipuun Point Reservation covers 138 hectares, an island connected to the Palawan mainland by mangrove forest. It was declared a Site Museum Reservation in April 1972 and named a priority site for tourism development in 1991. In 2006, the Tabon Cave Complex and all of Lipuun P...

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Image: Jimaggro | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tabon Caves: What the Caves Still Hold

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philip Maise, CC BY-SA 4.0. The paradox of Tabon is abundance and neglect existing side by side. Of 215 known caves, the vast majority remain unexplored. Excavated remains sit in storage, unexamined. Holy Trinity University in Puerto Princesa was selected in 2015 to establish a College of Tabonology, a disc...

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Image: Philip Maise | CC BY-SA 4.0