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The Archaeology of Pericolonialism: Responses of the “Unconquered” to Spanish Conquest and Colonialism in Ifugao, Philippines

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Stephen Acabado at University of California, Los Angeles
Stephen Acabado
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Pericolonial archaeology investigates areas where European military conquests were unsuccessful, but were economically and politically affected by conquests and subsequent colonial activities in adjacent regions. By using a case study from the Philippines, this article focuses on the responses of indigenous peoples in the highland Philippines who appear to have resisted Spanish cooptation. The archaeological record suggests that economic and political intensification occurred in Ifugao coinciding with the appearance of the Spanish in the northern Philippines. This work on pericolonial archaeology shows that the effects of colonialism extended far beyond the areas actually colonized. More importantly, the investigations reported in this essay add to the increasing evidence of the false differentiation of the colonized and the “uncolonized.”
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The Archaeology of Pericolonialism: Responses
of the BUnconquered^to Spanish
Conquest and Colonialism in Ifugao, Philippines
Stephen Acabado
1
Published online: 8 April 2016
#Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract Pericolonial archaeology investigates areas where European military con-
quests were unsuccessful, but were economically and politically affected by conquests
and subsequent colonial activities in adjacent regions. By using a case study from the
Philippines, this article focuses on the responses of indigenous peoples in the highland
Philippines who appear to have resisted Spanish cooptation. The archaeological record
suggests that economic and political intensification occurred in Ifugao coinciding with
the appearance of the Spanish in the northern Philippines. This work on pericolonial
archaeology shows that the effects of colonialism extended far beyond the areas
actually colonized. More importantly, the investigations reported in this essay add to
the increasing evidence of the false differentiation of the colonized and the Buncolonized.^
Keywords Pericolonialism .Iberian colonialism .Philippines .Ifugao .Political
consolidation
Introduction
The Spanish conquest of the New World resulted in a dramatic decline of indigenous
populations and the subsequent colonization of most of what we now refer to as Iberian
Americas. The colonization process however, was not monolithic; multiple groups
were documented to have moved into mountain ranges to avoid and/or resist direct
colonization by the Spanish (e.g., Dillehay 2014; Mcalister 1984; Palka 2005; Peterson
1991). In the Philippines, the Spanish conquest also proceeded swiftly in the lowlands,
but was unable to establish a permanent presence in the Cordillera highlands (Fig. 1).
The effects of colonialism in the highlands, however, are evident particularly in the
Int J Histor Archaeol (2017) 21:1–26
DOI 10.1007/s10761-016-0342-9
*Stephen Acabado
acabado@anthro.ucla.edu
1
Department of Anthropology, University of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... These terraced highland landscapes, now recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site (UNESCO, 1995), were initially assumed by scholars to be two-thousand to three-thousand years old (Barton, 1919;Barton, 1922;Beyer, 1955) and to represent a vivid example of the sweeping impact of past intensive agriculture on tropical forest environments, particularly in montane areas. However, post-1950s research in ethnography (Keesing, 1962;Scott, 1966), linguistics (Reid, 1994), oral tradition (Lambrecht, 1967;Conklin, 1980), and archaeology (Maher, 1973;Conklin, 1980;Acabado S. B. 2012;Acabado S. 2012;Acabado, 2017;Acabado, 2018) all suggest the terraces are relatively young (see Supplementary Material). Rather than being millennia old, they were likely constructed between the 16th and 18th centuries after the Spanish first conquered northern Luzon's lowlands in 1572-74 CE (Blair and Robertson, 1909). ...
... Rather than being millennia old, they were likely constructed between the 16th and 18th centuries after the Spanish first conquered northern Luzon's lowlands in 1572-74 CE (Blair and Robertson, 1909). Acabado (2017) has argued that the terraces allowed the Ifugao to function as a "pericolonial society," as a people influenced by Spain's conquest of the Luzon lowlands who nonetheless maintained their independence, grew in number, and developed more rigid social hierarchies outside of the colonial system. Furthermore, key to this pericolonial society's growth, ethnographic and palaeoecological research suggests, was a highly integrated agroforestry system that employed carefully managed woodlots (muyong), swidden fields (uma), and wet-field terraces (payo) that enabled long-term, sustainable cultivation of rice, root crops, and usable tree species. ...
... We quantify land use for a principal settlement of the Tuwali-Ifugao people, Old Kiyyangan Village (OKV), which was inhabited from 900 CE until the mid-nineteenth century when it was razed by a Spanish military expedition. We design our models according to Acabado's (2017) pericolonialism hypothesis, which states that lowland migrants avoiding Spanish dominion swelled the Cordillera's population, leading to the rapid expansion of rice terraces and the adoption of wetrice as one of Ifugao's primary starches. This enables us to explore the potential ramifications of rice intensification and demographic growth. ...
Land Use Change in a Pericolonial Society: Intensification and Diversification in Ifugao, Philippines Between 1570 and 1800 CE
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Land use modelling is increasingly used by archaeologists and palaeoecologists seeking to quantify and compare the changing influence of humans on the environment. In Southeast Asia, the intensification of rice agriculture and the arrival of European colonizers have both been seen as major catalysts for deforestation, soil erosion, and biodiversity change. Here we consider the Tuwali-Ifugao people of the Cordillera Central (Luzon, Philippines), who resisted Spanish colonial subjugation from the 16th to the mid-nineteenth century, in part through the development of a world-renowned system of intensive wet-rice terrace agriculture. To quantify changes in how the Tuwali-Ifugao used their environment, we model land use in Old Kiyyangan Village, a long-inhabited settlement, at two timepoints: circa 1570 CE, prior to the Spanish arrival in Luzon, and circa 1800 CE, before the village was sacked by Spanish military expeditions. Our model demonstrates that between 1570 and 1800 the adoption of rice as a staple and the corresponding expansion in terrace agriculture, along with a general diversification of diet and land use, enabled the village’s population to double without increasing total land use area. Further, this major intensification led to the solidification of social hierarchies and occurred without a proportional increase in deforestation.
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... Social changes in Indigenous societies, when faced with colonial powers, are commonly observed in many parts of the world, especially European colonies where Indigenous economic, cultural, or socio-political aspects were substantially impacted (Dietler, 2005;Silliman, 2005;Voss, 2005). Recent studies demonstrate that the indirect effects of colonialism, or involvement in long-distance trade, may also have impacted Indigenous societies, this is known as a pericolonial context (Acabado, 2017;Trabert, 2017;Wang and Marwick, 2020a). Burials are important for understanding past societies because material culture and biological records of burial behaviors can represent the social ranking of the deceased, and social relations between them (Binford, 1971;Curet and Oliver, 1998;Drennan et al., 2010;Saxe, 1970). ...
... Different from Heping dao and Tamsui in northern Taiwan where European forts are located, the remote geographical setting of northeastern Taiwan resulted in less interference from European colonial powers, but more frequent trade activities due to local natural resources, such as rice and deerskins (Chen, 2005;Cheng, 2017). This makes northeastern Taiwan a special area to explore the effect of European colonization in a pericolonial context that remains not well understood compared to European colonial bases (Acabado, 2017;Trabert, 2017). ...
... The archaeological record is valuable here because it gives us a better understanding of the indirect European impacts in understudied pericolonial contexts of East Asia (e.g. Acabado, 2017;Trabert, 2017). ...
A Bayesian networks approach to infer social changes from burials in northeastern Taiwan during the European colonization period
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Burials provide valuable information to study social structures based on the assumption that burials and associated grave goods can represent social roles and relations in a society. To study social relationships, network analysis has been increasingly applied to archaeological data to infer interactions and relationships between entities. Statistical approaches to network analysis, such as exponential random graph models (ERGMs), provide a way to test hypotheses about dynamic processes of network formation. However, computational difficulties and sensitivity to uncertainties limit the application of ERGMs. In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian framework on ERGMs that enables an efficient computational process, effective quantification of uncertainty, and robust model evaluation of network properties. We tested a hypothesis of social change relative to the arrival of Europeans by studying burial data from Kiwulan, an Iron Age site in northeastern Taiwan. The results indicate a transition among the burials from network ties based on ritual objects to wealth objects, and a more centralized structure with increased social differentiation after the European presence was established in the 17th century. Our case study demonstrates the effectiveness of Bayesian network analysis for archaeological data, and expands the use of burials in understanding the impacts of colonial presence on Indigenous groups in a pericolonial context.
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... The recent archaeological work in Ifugao, Philippines, continues and expands upon Stephen Acabado's prior research [3,10,[15][16][17][18], suggesting the iconic Ifugao rice terraces were constructed in response to Spanish colonization. This challenges the older belief that the terraces are millennia old and reshapes the understanding of the region's history and the Indigenous Ifugao people. ...
Older Is Not Necessarily Better: Decolonizing Ifugao History through the Archaeology of the Rice Terraces
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This study examines the intersection of archaeological data and community narratives in interpreting the Ifugao Rice Terraces in the Philippines, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Long regarded as 2000-year-old symbols of an uncolonized cultural past, recent research challenges this view, suggesting a 16th-century origin coinciding with Spanish contact. The longstanding characterization of the Ifugao Rice Terraces as 2000-year-old monuments cemented a perception of Ifugao culture as static and unchanging, overshadowing the dynamic cultural practices that have persisted and evolved over the centuries. It is crucial to recognize that these terraces are not frozen in time but are active representations of Ifugao’s living culture, which has continually adapted to social, environmental, and historical changes while maintaining its distinct identity. This paradigm shift, supported by radiocarbon dating and ethnohistorical analysis, aligns more closely with local oral histories and portrays the Ifugao not as passive inheritors of tradition but as active participants in their history. We argue for the integration of scientific data with community stories, presenting a holistic understanding of the terraces as dynamic elements of Ifugao resilience and identity. The findings advocate a move away from romanticized historical interpretations toward a narrative that respects the complexity and adaptability of Indigenous cultural landscapes.
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... This provided more food and enabled them to resist Spanish colonial forces for most of the colonial period. 85 The terraces, villages, and swidden fields fill many tens of kilometres of mountain slopes across north-central Luzon. Here the terraces cover an area of about sixty square kilometres in aerial extent. ...
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Mountains and highlands are not what scholars have conventionally imagined them to be: environments that limit and constrain their inhabitants in deterministic ways. Rather, mountains and highlands provide unique opportunities for people to engage in creative transformation of their societies. Highland communities are connected to a wider world, and they radically remake and experiment with their landscapes, settlements, and societies. Mountains serve as birthplaces and testing grounds for statecraft, urbanism, irrigation, and monumental landscape engineering. Here we explore the diversity of highland communities by analysing the latest archaeological and historical discoveries from three regions across Southeast Asia: the Kulen mountains (Cambodia), the volcanoes of central Java (Indonesia), and the Ifugao highlands (the Philippines). We find that, far from being a negative image of the ‘civilized’ lowlands, mountains were creative, diverse, dynamic, and well-connected places. This compels us to change the way we conceive of today’s highland communities and their relationships to modern nation-states.
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... During this time (circa 1600) people had started founding villages in the mountains of Central Luzon to avoid the Spaniards in the lowlands. Although there is some archaeological evidence of people in the region before that, they had limited trade goods (Acabado, 2017). However, the possibility of using highly-prized traded metal to make rock art pre-1600, although unlikely, cannot be discounted. ...
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... The combination of archeological, linguistic, plant microfossil, and recent radiocarbon dating all suggest that the Ifugao moved to higher elevations and innovated wet-rice cultivation in a very short period of time, probably beginning between the 14th and 16th centuries, with intensification of the terraces largely in response and as resistance to Spanish colonization (Acabado, 2009(Acabado, , 2017Horrocks et al., 2018;Keesing, 1962;Lambrecht, 1967). Suggestions of a later date for the terraces has been controversial. ...
Learning from indigenous and local knowledge: The deep history of nature-based solutions
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Key messages • Indigenous peoples and local communities around the world have developed nature-based, resilient, and sustainable solutions for water security based on traditional knowledge-practice-value systems. • Water sowing and harvesting technologies such as albarradas in Ecuador, sand dams in Africa, and wetland management and infiltration systems in Spain and the Andes work with nature to “sow” water for storage in soils, river sands, and groundwater, making water available for harvesting during times of water scarcity. • Integrated land and water management systems rely on managing ecosystem processes in combination with irrigation and terracing infrastructure to control the timing and supplies of water to complex agroforestry, rice or wet-pond taro cultivation, home gardens, and in some cases coastal fishponds and fisheries, as well as providing clean water for households. Predating contemporary integrated watershed and ecosystem-based management, these systems that emphasize protecting source watersheds are models of sustainably working and building with nature to manage water resources. • Continued viability of many of these practices is under threat, as Indigenous peoples and local communities remain marginalized in many countries, are under pressure from the forces of globalization, with lives and territories threatened in several places, and with traditional and Indigenous knowledge lost with the passing of older generations and forced migration. • However, these practices and the knowledge they are based on are being revitalized as Indigenous and local peoples lead movements to protect and revitalize their heritage, while scientists, conservationists, water managers, and governments increasingly recognize the value of these traditional nature-based solutions.
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Readjusting the Focus: An Exercise in Reexamining Indigenous Filipino Agency in Exhibition Photography of the 1904 World’s Fair
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This thesis discusses the presentation of indigenous Filipinos in exhibition photography of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. Rather than as passive participants to the American presentation of benevolent assimilation, this study argues that photographs can be used to find instances of indigenous agency and that the indigenous Filipinos presented in them were active participants in the "event of photography." This is done through a 'watching' of photographic ensembles of the five major Filipino indigenous groups (Igorot, Moro, Visayan, Bagobo, Negrito), looking at how each group was presented in photographs with a single subject, the group interacting amongst themselves, and the group when interacting with Western technology and culture.
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Bibliography
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Warfare in the pre-Columbian Andes took on many forms, from inter-village raids to campaigns of conquest. Andean societies also created spectacular performances and artwork alluding to war – acts of symbolism that worked as political rhetoric while drawing on ancient beliefs about supernatural beings, warriors, and the dead. In this book, Elizabeth Arkush disentangles Andean warfare from Andean war-related spectacle and offers insights into how both evolved over time. Synthesizing the rich archaeological record of fortifications, skeletal injury, and material evidence, she presents fresh visions of war and politics among the Moche, Chimú, Inca, and pre-Inca societies of the conflict-ridden Andean highlands. The changing configurations of Andean power and violence serve as case studies to illustrate a sophisticated general model of the different forms of warfare in pre-modern societies. Arkush's book makes the complex pre-history of Andean warfare accessible by providing a birds-eye view of its major patterns and contrasts.
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The Work of Boundaries: Critical Cartographies and the Archaeological Record of the Relatively Recent Past
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The Philippine administrative system: A review of the past, present, and the future research
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Its earliest institutions were barangays, but Hinduism and Islam brought greater governments. Spanish immigrants expanded Spain, culminating in Manila's Captaincy General of the Philippines. The Philippines was independent within New Spain. This reliance on local leaders for the government led to the principalia. Some Muslim and interior countries lost Spanish rule. The 19th-century mestizo elite defined Filipino identity. They initiated the Propaganda Movement, which led to the Spanish-American War. In 1898, Spain relinquished control. The US ruled the entire archipelago after the war. It had strong ties to the Nacionalist Party and other political parties. There was a constitution and a president in 1935. The WWII Japanese invasion shattered independence hopes. The Japanese occupation ended in 1946. Over time, the Liberals and Nacionalistas traded charismatic leaders and shared principles. Martial law dissolved the two-party system in 1972. The Philippines is a presidential democracy. The Philippine Constitution is the legal framework. Constitute 1987 was approved by a national vote. Many additional laws and government norms, and regulations support it. These include administrative, court, and municipal laws created under the constitution. All administrative functions are included. The goal is to identify and communicate the guiding principles. Organizational behavior is a subset of behavioral sciences vital to public administration. These methods made more sense. People's motivation and productivity are influenced by various elements - political, social, economic. These also help understand government behavior. In dealing with government agencies and officials, many have seen that human attitude, presupposition biases, and perceptions influence how the administration is done. It is democratic because the people choose their leaders. It is democratic because the people are sovereign. The Philippine government is unitary, presidential, and bureaucratic. The president governs it. The Philippines is a unitary state with a single president. The Philippine government has three branches: legislative, executive, and judiciary. Finally, it is bureaucratic, with superior and inferior/rank-and-file offices and officials. The current Philippine system of government has a strong President and an equally strong Vice President, each elected individually for a single six-year term. There is no re-election for both except that the Vice-President can run for president. The former president can also run for other positions (one former president is now the city mayor of Manila, and another was elected as a Congresswoman). In essence, the president is like an absolute monarch with a limited six-year term because impeachment to remove him from power is so expensive, time-consuming, tedious, and uncertain that it can't be relied on to work. In short, today's bureaucracy is a product of how it has been regarded and utilized by the government in power. Like most public institutions, its functions are largely determined by the goals they are set to achieve, the processes that society expect them to utilize, the amount of power and resources that they are vested with, the level of accountability that they exercise, and the outputs and the outcomes they are expected to deliver. The administrative system has shown that while bureaucracy is judged in how it can respond efficiently and effectively to society's challenges, it must be understood in terms of its functions within a political context. Thus, the Philippine administration is heavily influenced by the Spanish and American colonial regimes, which have shaped the country's culture. An examination of pre-colonial societies provides a framework for locating Philippine "public administration" in this article. Today's administration requires a review and examination of our historical roots, which could have a significant impact on public administration in the Philippines." By comparing pre-colonial traits to Western models of public administration, the analysis will be widened.
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Outline of a Theory of Practice
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  • Jun 1977
Outline of a Theory of Practice is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu, a distinguished French anthropologist, develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood. With his central concept of the habitus, the principle which negotiates between objective structures and practices, Bourdieu is able to transcend the dichotomies which have shaped theoretical thinking about the social world. The author draws on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria) to illustrate his theoretical propositions. With detailed study of matrimonial strategies and the role of rite and myth, he analyses the dialectical process of the 'incorporation of structures' and the objectification of habitus, whereby social formations tend to reproduce themselves. A rigorous consistent materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic capital and, through analysis of the different modes of domination, a theory of symbolic power.
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