Dewil Valley

Dewil Valley, located in the northernmost part of Palawan, an island province of the Philippines that is located in the Mimaropa region, is an archaeological landscape composed of dozens of sites, thousands of artifacts and features. According to the University of the Philippines School of Archaeology, the closest settlement can be found in New Ibajay, which is covered by the town capital of El Nido, which is located around 9 km (5.6 mi) south-east of Dewil Valley. Physically it measures around 7 km (4.3 mi) long, and 4 km (2.5 mi) wide. It is in this place which the Ille Cave and Rockshelter site, one of the main archaeological sites, can be found. Ille is a karst tower with a network of 3 cave mouths located at its base. It has been discovered that this site in particular has been used and occupied by humans over multiple time periods, from the Later Pleistocene into more recent times.

Although excavations for this site have been done since 1998, surveys and recordings were done as early as the 1920s by Carl Guthe, in an attempt to record as many archaeological sites in northern Palawan as possible. This sparked the interest of Robert Fox (1970), but his work in the El Nido area was also limited to recording rather than excavations. It was only in 1990 that a full archaeological survey was made by the National Museum of the Philippines and it was only in 1998 that the first test excavation was started. In 1999, a full excavation by archaeologists Solheim, De La Torre, and Bautista. Since then, multiple excavations have been made, with the most substantial work being carried out by the Palawan Island Palaeohistory Research Project from 2004-2025, at several sites including Ille, Pasimbahan Magsanib, and several sites in the Makangit karst towers (see reports by the PIPRP 2004-2025 by Paz et al., Lewis et al., Carlos et al.).