Early Bisayan culture as depicted in the Povedano and Pavon manuscripts

Abstract

The past is prologue to the present. What we are now we owe to what has gone before us. Many of the cherished institutions, values, norms, and practices of our present society had their beginnings hundreds of years ago. Some might had been bom only in the past decades, and still others may be much younger; but all had their germinal or formative period sometime in the past.

For the purpose of this paper, I would like to attempt to reconstruct the kind of society obtaining in Negros (and Panay as well) before and during the early part of the Spanish regime in the Philippines.

This study is based on the Povedano Manuscripts of 1572 and 1578 and the Pavon Manuscripts of 1838— 1839 all of which were written in Negros but also deal with Panay.