RESEARCH DATA:

Ga’dang garments are among the most heavily embellished textiles in the Cordillera. The use of beads of varying sizes, shapes, and colors in embroidery, tassel work, and other embellishing techniques, along with finely crafted execution, makes these textiles truly remarkable. One such example from this textile collection is the baruwasi, commonly worn by Ga’dang women. It is richly embellished with blue, red, white, and yellow beads, which are embroidered and sewn onto the textile. There are a series of triangle-shaped motifs made of white beads on the garment. Moreover, the base textile used for this garment features a striped design locally referred to as la-lad. The la-lad is a plain-woven cloth with alternating stripes of brown and deep red, but in the case of this textile from the collection, the stripes consist of black, saturated orange-brown, and white. The bottom of the garment also has beaded fringes with circular metal coins attached at the ends as dangles. These coins, possibly made by tarnishing silver causing a yellowish discoloration, feature inscriptions of “ten centavos,” “Filipinas,” and “United States of America,” with varying years of coin production. The coins depict a standing woman holding a hammer on an anvil in her right hand (Numista, 2024), alongside a smoking Mayon volcano on the right. This type of coin was a standard circulation coin used from 1937 to 1945 during the Commonwealth of the Philippines under American occupation (Numista, 2024). The acquisition of these coins was likely due to the trading of the Ga’dang with other groups from lowland Luzon.