Ending the Antiquity Debates: The "Short History" Model of the Ifugao Rice Terraces, Philippines

Summary

Local wisdom and nationalist sentiments would have us uphold the long-held belief in the age of the Ifugao Rice Terraces, espoused by pioneer anthropologists of the Philippines, Roy F. Barton and Henry Otley Beyer. Recent findings by the Ifugao Archaeological Project (IAP), however, have provided new information which have driven us to rethink this proposed date, primarily because of the dearth of archaeological data to support the "long-history" model. Evidence is now pointing to a relatively more recent history of Cordillera rice terracing traditions – a "short-history" model grounded on ethnographic, ethnohistoric, archaeological, and paleoenvironmental datasets. Our paper presents findings of the 2012, 2013, and 2014 field seasons of the IAP and their significance in finally resolving the antiquity of the Ifugao rice terraces.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Cross-cultural encounters/entanglements in Island Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific

Keywords

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