Dating Construction and Use of Ifugao Rice Terrace

ABOUT THE LECTURE: The origins and age of the Ifugao rice terraces in the Philippine Cordillera continue to provoke interest and imagination in academic and popular debates. For Southeast Asian scholars, dating these terraces is critical for understanding Philippine prehistory and Southeast Asian patterns more generally. Beyond the scholarly community, the terraced Ifugao landscape has captured the world’s imagination as an important cultural landscape (UNESCO 1995). To date, however, insufficient work has been undertaken to determine either when the terraces were first constructed, or the period of time involved in the creation and development of this tiered landscape.

Resolving the antiquity of the entire Cordillera terraced field tradition requires archaeological work to determine whether the conventional ‘long history’ or the revisionist ‘short history’ more accurately represents the occupational history of this region. Such work requires decades of research in different provinces across the mountainous region, beginning with areas within Ifugao province. This study presents chronometric dates from well-controlled proveniences in the Banaue district of Ifugao Province.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Stephen Acabado received his BA in Anthropology from the University of the Philippines, Diliman and his MA in Anthropology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is currently a PhD Candidate in the Anthropology Department, UH Manoa, completing a dissertation on the archaeology of the Ifugao rice terraces. His research on the Ifugao has been funded by an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant and Henry Luce Foundation Initiative on Asian Archaeology and Early History. He has also received degree fellowships from the East-West Center and the Asian Cultural Council. His research interests include Southeast Asian archaeology, landscape archaeology, and heritage management.

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Center for Philippine Studies, Manoa Campus

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Clemen C. Montero, 956-6086, cps@hawaii.edu, www.hawaii.edu/cps

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