Hanging Coffins of Sagada
Interesting facts
- Hanging coffins are a minority custom: most Kankanaey coffins were tucked into crevices or stacked inside limestone caves, placed according to status and cause of death.
- Most of those honoured with a cliff burial belonged to the amam-a of the dap-ay, the village's communal men's house and civic centre.
- Only one woman is documented as having been given a hanging-coffin burial.
- Traditionally only elders who had married and had grandchildren were considered for this form of burial.
- Before burial the body is traditionally seated on a wooden death chair, bound with rattan and vines and turned towards the door so relatives can pay their respects.
- The coffins are always set beneath natural overhangs, either on rock shelves or on beams slotted into holes cut into the cliff.
- If an elder became too weak or ill to carve a coffin, the family made it for them instead.
- The limestone around Sagada was once seabed, and fossil seashells can be seen in the walls of nearby Sumaguing Cave.
- A related tradition exists among the Toraja of Sulawesi, whose boat-shaped cliff coffins are guarded by carved wooden effigies of the dead called tau-tau.
Why it is worth it
High on the limestone walls of Echo Valley, in the mountains of northern Luzon, wooden coffins are fixed to the rock: resting on ledges, wedged into crevices or laid on beams driven into the cliff face, some of them stacked one above another. They belong to the Kankanaey people of Sagada, a town set in a valley about 1,500 metres up in the Cordillera Central, among limestone ridges, caves and rice terraces. In the nearby Lumiang Cave older coffins are stacked inside, in the same tradition carried underground.
The practice is a mark of honour rather than the ordinary way of burial. It was reserved for respected members of the community, in particular elders of the amam-a, the council of men who led the traditional rituals and made decisions for the village; a coffin placed high on the cliff reflected the standing of the person inside. The coffins are short because the dead were placed in them in a flexed, foetal position, in keeping with a belief shared by many pre-colonial cultures of the Philippines that a person should leave the world in the same position in which they entered it. Elders often carved their own coffins from hollowed logs during their lifetimes, and burial was preceded by rites known as sangadil.
The Kankanaey hold that the dead, placed in caves or on cliffs rather than in the earth, remain close by, and their spirits continue to watch over and protect the living. How old the tradition is has not been established archaeologically; the oldest coffins are thought to be several centuries old, and local accounts trace the custom back much further. Similar cliff burials are known from other parts of Asia, notably those left by the Bo people in southwest China.
Getting there
Echo Valley lies at the edge of the town of Sagada, about 18 km by road from Bontoc, the capital of Mountain Province, which is about 8 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is Cauayan Airport (CYZ) in the Cagayan Valley, about 92 km away in a straight line across the mountains; most overland routes into the Cordillera run from Baguio and Manila by mountain road.
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