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Updated: June 5, 2025
As they passed out of the pueblo each carried a tightly bound club-like torch of burning palay straw; this would smolder slowly for hours. On the stone dike of each sementera the owner paused to place three small stones to hold the olla.
Much of this labor is performed by water power, much by wind power, and about all the children and old people in a pueblo are busied from early dawn until twilight in the sementera as independent guards. Besides, throughout the long night men and women build fires among the sementeras and guard their crop from the wild hog. It is a critical time with the Igorot.
As many as a dozen women often work together in one sementera to hasten the planting. There are usually two or three little girls with their mothers, who while away the hours playing work.
In addition to the various things buried with the married woman, the unmarried has a sleeping hat. Babes and children up to 6 or 7 years of age are buried in the sementera wrapped in a crude beaten-bark mantle. This garment is folded and wrapped about the body, and for babes, at least, is bound and tied close about them.
A hog is killed and each household gives Ang'-way a manojo of palay. He pleads to Lumawig: "Tum-ke'-ka ay li-fo'-o ta-a-ye'-o nan in sa-ma'-mi." This prayer is: "No more cold and fog! Pity those working in the sementera!" Ceremonies connected with head taking Kafokab Ka-fo'-kab is the name of a ceremony performed as soon as a party of successful head-hunters returns home.
In the pueblo, the sementeras, and the mountains one knows he is always surrounded by a-ni'-to. They are ever ready to trip one up, to push him off the high stone sementera dikes or to visit him with disease.
If Japan, as has Formosa, had an early Malayan culture, as will probably be proved in due time, one should not be surprised to find old rice terraces in the mountains of Batanes Islands and the Loo Choo Islands which lie between Luzon and Japan. Building the sementera
One such machine may send its shock a quarter of a mile and trouble the birds over an area half an acre in extent. Other Igorot, as those of the upper Abra River in Lepanto Province, employ this same jerking machine to produce a sharp, clicking sound in the sementera.
All the harvesters were women, and they scolded our party long and severely while we were yet six or eight rods distant; my Igorot boys carrying the photographic outfit boys who had lived four months in my house laughingly but positively refused to follow me closer than three or four rods to the sementera. No photographs were obtained at that time.
The labor of turning and fertilizing the soil and transplanting the young rice is all in progress at the same time generally, too, in the same sementera. Since each is a distinct process, however, I shall consider each separately. Before the soil is turned in a sementera it has given up its annual crop of camotes, and the water has been turned on to soften the earth.
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