#cordilleras

[arkipelagic]

[Time Trowel] The Ifugao Rice Terraces are 400 years old. That matters.

The terraces were built by communities who responded to political and economic change with innovation and resolve. This is a story that shou

Based on two decades of research, we now understand that the terraces were likely constructed around 400 to 500 years ago. In archaeological terms, that is recent.

These terraces were not built in isolation from colonial events. In fact, their construction and expansion coincided with Spanish colonial pressure in the lowlands. The Ifugao were never isolated during the colonial period. They maintained active engagements — economic, cultural, and political — with neighboring groups and colonial agents.

The terraces are better understood as part of a larger strategy to engage, negotiate, resist, navigate, and adapt to external forces.

Radiocarbon dating has been essential in rethinking the timeline of Ifugao history. A radiocarbon date of AD 1300 from the Banaue confirms that people were already living in the region prior to Spanish contact.

Excavations at the Old Kiyyangan Village (OKV) site suggest even earlier occupation, with dates going back 1,000 years before present (BP). However, these early dates do not indicate the presence of rice cultivation.

Botanical analyses from these layers have not yielded rice remains, suggesting that wet-rice agriculture was not practiced during the earliest phases of settlement. This absence reinforces the idea that intensified rice terrace construction was a response to later colonial entanglements rather than a long-standing tradition.

(…) Their terraces were part of a deliberate political and cultural strategy. They were built in response to threat, not as a product of isolation. They show how upland communities adapted and asserted control over their future in a rapidly changing world.

But the national curriculum continues to sideline these histories. Philippine nationalist history, largely shaped during the American colonial period, emphasized a singular story of nationhood. This story focused on heroes, battles, and key dates that followed a linear narrative of colonization, revolution, and independence.

While this framework helped create a shared sense of identity, it also flattened the historical experiences of communities that followed different timelines. Groups like the Ifugao, Kalinga, Subanen, and Aeta groups are often described as untouched by colonization or outside the mainstream, when in fact they actively shaped their own histories and contributed to broader national developments.

[anexperimentallife]

Just watching the mist blow across the nearby mountaintops and listening to the wind chimes I bought for @thesurestthing

[kvetch19]

x

[what-a-colorful-mess]

Huayhuash, Cordillera, Peru

[mentisflatus]

Two hundred nine.

In two years, 2019-2021, with the pandemic and the caregive, I finished all my book illustrations today, 12:06 PM, Sunday, 11 April 2021, all two hundred nine (209) of them

Maycapal: Philippine Mythopoeia. From the timelessness of the cloud archipelago to the Philippine Republic of 1946.

Here's to the anitos, diwatas, Indarapatra, to the babaylans, to Philippine flora and fauna, to myths, folklife and folklore, to the proud pre-conquest natives of the archipelago, to our Austronesian heritage, to the imagined Filipino and the Philippines!

To Thomas Bulfinch, to Edith Hamilton, to Hieronymus Bosch, to the early printers and typographers, to Cesare Ripa, to the medieval traditions brought by the holy orders, to renaissance humanists, heretics and alchemists.

To Francisco Balagtas, to Damian Domingo, to Jose Honorato Lozano, to Jose Rizal, Juan Luna and Felix R. Hidalgo.

To Gaiman, to Pullman, to Le Guin.

To semiotics, to Umberto Eco.

To archetypes, to Carl Jung.

To folklore, to Maximo D. Ramos, to E. Arsenio Manuel, to Damiana L. Eugenio.

To history, heraldry, comparative literature, religion and mythology.

To museums, archives, and libraries.

I owe to them my love of reading, drawing, and imagining.

Now to continue my writing!

IMAGE NFT: GOD-ARMOR LUMAWIG collectible https://rarible.com/token/0x60f80121c31a0d46b5279700f9df786054aa5ee5:645314:0xe236d526e1d08dbd8b6fd063fc36271818e71257? #rarible #ethereum #nonfungible #digitalasset #nft via @rariblecom

[arkipelagic]

[Time Trowel] Seriously, let go of the myth about the Ifugao Rice Terraces' age

To cling to the Beyer and Barton model is to repeat the colonial assumption that the Ifugao could not have built their own terraces. It eras

The fact is, there is no archaeological evidence for [the 2,000-year-old rice terraces] claim. The model was created by early 20th-century American scholars H. Otley Beyer and Roy Barton, who based their arguments not on data but on racialized theories of culture and human development. Their ideas have long been repeated in textbooks, tourist promotions, and nationalist histories, often reshaping Indigenous narratives to serve national agendas. The evidence, however, tells a very different story.

[…] In Taiwan, long thought to be the starting point of the so-called Austronesian expansion, millet rather than rice dominated the diet two millennia ago. Rice accounts for less than 5% of archaeobotanical samples and was grown in rainfed fields rather than irrigated paddies. Terracing and irrigated rice only began in the 17th century when Han Chinese settlers arrived, transforming landscapes within decades. If they could do so quickly, why assume Cordillera farmers could not have built the terraces later and with similar speed?

In Madagascar, the story is similar — rice appears only around 1,200 to 1,400 years ago, introduced much later than once believed. Local varieties emerged through hybridization and adaptation, not through inheritance from a timeless tradition.

Similarly, archaeobotanical studies in the Philippines show that taro and millet were staples long before rice became dominant. The large-scale turn to wet rice farming accelerated only under Spanish colonization, when rice became taxable. Irrigation ditches known as zanjas were introduced, and Ilocano farmers transformed them into zanjeras, cooperative systems that combined Indigenous practices with colonial structures.

[…] Beyer, often called the Father of Philippine Anthropology, explicitly argued that the terraces were not the work of the Ifugao themselves. He wrote in 1955:

"I do not believe that the physical type, language, or culture of these people is wholly a native development. The evidence seems to indicate that the present-day Ifugaos are the result of mixture, perhaps one or more thousand years ago, of several widely different native types with an incoming people of high culture." In other words, he thought the Ifugao were incapable of such innovation and that outsiders must have introduced the practice.

[anexperimentallife]

Yet another balcony pic (see my Baguio tag for more and better--someday I'll add "balcony" to all these shots to differentiate then from all my other Baguio pics)

[anexperimentallife]

Even when I'm in this much pain, all I have to do is make it to the window to see this view. Not as spectacular in some ways as the views from our old condo building in Manila, but I like it.