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.
