Ivatan

The Ivatan are an Austronesian people of the Batanes and Babuyan Islands between Luzon and Taiwan. The islands were stepping stones in the Austronesian expansion from Taiwan around 3000 BCE, settled again by northern Luzon migrants around 1200 BCE, whose descendants became the Ivatan; archaeology links them to the jade lingling-o trade network reaching Taiwan, Vietnam and Borneo, and pottery from about 1200 CE shows trade with Song and Yuan China.

They traded and intermarried with the Tao of Orchid Island, whose language resembles their own. Life on the typhoon-scoured islands shaped their culture: they grew yams and taro, took flying fish in spring, wore the palm headgear called vakul, and built fortified hill refuges called ijang.

Spain annexed Batanes in 1783, and in 1786 the Ivatans were forced into lowland towns; Spanish lime kilns gave them coral-limestone houses, thick-walled against storms, while anito ancestral worship gradually gave way to Catholicism.