"Grace Barretto-Tesoro is a well-known archaeologist from the University of the Philippines Diliman. She has published numerous works on archaeology in the Philippines, particularly on burials from the precolonial to the Spanish colonial periods. The Ruins of Pinagbayanan is not her first publication on this Batangas town. In 2017, she published an article on Pinagbayanan entitled “Power and Resilience: Flooding and Occupation in a Late-Nineteenth-Century Philippine Town.” The book under review is more comprehensive and its focus is not only the town itself but the process of doing archaeology. This process is discussed using the archaeological project Barretto-Tesoro’s team carried out from 2009 to 2012 at Pinabayanan in San Juan, Batangas.

The aim of the book is to present archaeology in a way that is understandable to people outside the field, beyond the community of specialists. The author does this through a photo essay, as the title indicates. As expected, there are numerous photos and write-ups that simplify the content of the technical reports that archaeological projects like this one normally produce. The book not only shows the excavations and artifacts found on the site; it also shows “how spaces were constructed and perceived—the space of Pinagbayanan in the context of the town of San Juan, the spaces occupied by the ruins, the spaces within the ruins, and the same spaces in the ruins as seen by the town residents and archaeologists” (5). Pinagbayanan is presented as a shared space that exhibits multiple functions. The ruins are “historical spaces, archaeological sites, and part of a modern-day settlement” (5)..."