The Butuan Boat Site Museum, often called the Balangay Shrine, protects the excavation setting and remains of Butuan Boat 1 in Barangay Libertad. The boats were discovered in waterlogged deposits of an old river system during the 1970s. Their survival provides rare physical evidence of sophisticated plank-built watercraft and places precolonial communities in the Philippines within wider Southeast Asian maritime networks.
National Museum research dates the best-known Butuan boats between the late eighth and early tenth centuries CE. Builders joined shaped planks edge to edge and used projecting lugs and lashings within the hull, a technological tradition shared across Island Southeast Asia. The remains should not be described simply as giant dugout canoes, nor does one vessel alone prove every later claim made about the modern word “barangay.”