Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jasrep Determining the suitability of gold bulking villages articulated to the Lepanto gold district of Northwestern Luzon with the aid of WorldView2 satellite imagery Michael Armand P. Canilao Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago, United States Archaeological Studies Program, University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines ABSTRACT This paper presents a suitability model of bulking villages in the Lepanto gold district using the weighted overlay technique. An as an alternative to more environment-deterministic modelling in GIS, an attempt is made to use a hybrid of both environmental variables with social variables. The resulting raster model was then overlain on image enhanced WorldView2 scenes to remote sense high probability sites for bulking villages. Two known sites were also tested if their locations conformed to the gold bulking model. Danac site was more conducive to accommodate transshipment of bulkier loads while the Apaya site was more conducive to spotting ship arrivals on the coast. The variation is arguably connected to the latitude of agency of the upland gold miners vis a vis the lowland coastal polities. 1. Introduction The paper is a second case study of the gold evanescent market (Allegre, 1998: 148) encounters in Northwestern Luzon (NWL) Island between the 10th to the early 20th c (Fig. 1). The first case study in- volved the Antamok/Balatok-Tonglo-Aringay gold trading trails in the present day Province of Benguet (see Canilao, 2017). The trade network circulated products such as porcelain, silk, cotton, beeswax, gems, beads, and more importantly precious minerals such as gold, silver and tin (Junker, 1999: 222). The results of the case study present some interesting questions about the nature of gold trade in terms of access and control. But what is really interesting would be the divergences that we see between computer generated least cost path data and histori- cally recorded data in ancient accounts, maps, sketches and oral tra- ditions. It is possible that such divergences give us a purview into the local and regional social, economic, political landscape at the time. Noting that gold is the central commodity being moved from point to point, it is interesting to reconstruct the geopolitical landscape in the past in order to see how small scale indigenous miners negotiated their position in the local NWL market in the background of an expansive Indian Ocean- South China Sea (IO-SCS) trade system. In this case study, we begin with the question, how can we model locations of gold trade bulking villages? There are several GIS ap- proaches to predictive modelling of archaeological sites. Most ap- proaches; however, have been criticized for being too reliant on en- vironmental variables (see Wescott, 2001: 66, Lock and Harris, 2001: 44). Kvamme (2001: 23) is asking the community of GIS predictive modelling archaeologists to tap on more social variables into their analysis. Thus it is the attempt of this case study to integrate social variables in tandem with environmental variables. There are certain characteristics that a bulking village location must possess. In terms of slope and land class it can be suitable for dry cul- tivation at the minimum and wet cultivation at the maximum. Laurence Wilson for instance observed that the upland people pursued a spec- trum of subsistence strategies wherein on one hand they are in- defatigable prospectors; but at the same time, they also hunt, fish, harvest root crops (i.e., taro, camote), harvest rice in the paddies, gather wood, raise livestock, among other activities (1932: 4). In be- tween these activities they can investigate outcrops, slides, and cuts and assay gold bearing veins (ibid). This spectrum of activities may be re- lated to the putative “risk-reducing social strategies” (Rockman, 2003: 17) that people use to mitigate extraction of patchy resources. Given this flexibility in agricultural methods it can be argued then that slope degree is less of a determining factor in deciding where to establish the bulking village of the Igorots in NWL. Historical data also seem to support this argument when Quirante in his 1624 expedition http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.06.039 Received 7 May 2017; Received in revised form 18 June 2017; Accepted 25 June 2017 E-mail address: mcanil2@uic.edu. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 14 (2017) 620–637 2352-409X/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. MARK