Laura Lee Junker

Integrating History and Archaeology in the Study of Contact Period Philippine Chiefdoms

Malay texts, Philippine oral traditions, Chinese tributary records and geographies, early Spanish writings, and archaeological evidence from Philippine sites present divergent views of political structures and political economies in Philippine chiefdoms of the late first millennium to midsecond millennium A.D. While some sources claim a political landscape dominated by a few large-scale, highly centralized polities almost wholly supported through foreign trade, others suggest the presence of more heterogeneous and politically segmented configurations of varying scale and complexity and with eclectic economic bases. These disparate narratives are evaluated in terms of methodological biases, their cultural context, and the historical circumstances of their production.

Hunter‐gatherer landscapes and lowland trade in the prehispanic Philippines

Abstract Ethnographers have recently debated two distinct models of hunter‐gatherer and agriculturalist interaction in the tropical forests of island Southeast Asia: (1) the ‘Isolate’ Model, proposing that hunter‐gatherers had a social network and stable, tropical forest‐based foraging economy largely independent of contact with sedentary farmers until the historic era, and (2) the ‘Interdependent’ Model, suggesting a lengthy history of symbiotic exchange and economic overlap between the two populations. While these models have been examined and debated from the perspective of ethnohistoric and linguistic data, relevant archaeological evidence has been lacking. This paper uses archaeological data on settlement patterns, lithic assemblage composition and the regional circulation of ceramics, metal, and other trade goods to demonstrate that the types of economic interactions suggested by the ‘Interdependent’ Model have existed between lowland agriculturalists and upland foragers in the Tanjay Region of the ...

Long-term Change and Short-term Shifting in the Economy of Philippine Forager-Traders

When Europeans first made contact with mainland and island Southeast Asia populations, they found a complex amalgam of groups of extremely diverse economic orientations, levels of sociopolitical complexity, and linguistic and ethnic affiliations. Many researchers have stated that the considerable ecological diversity and geographic fragmentation of Southeast Asia contributed to the high degree of economic specialization and ubiquity of intensive interethnic exchange relations among various groups of tropical forest foragers, tribal swiddening populations, and complex chiefdoms and kingdoms focused on maritime trade and intensive rice farming (e.g., Dunn 1975; Hutterer,1974, 1976, 1983). The configurations of such interethnic trade systems in the historic period have been well documented by early texts associated with literate kingdoms of late first millennium A.D. and early second millennium A.n. Southeast Asia, Chinese trade records, and later European histories (Andaya 1975; Hall 1985:1-20, 80-89; 1992:257-259; Junker 1999:239-259; Miksic 1984; Wheatley 1983; Wolters 1971:13-14). Hunter-gatherer populations that generally inhabited the interior uplands of Southeast Asia include the Semang (Orang Ash) of Malaysia; the Punan and Penan of Borneo; the Kudu of Sumatra; the Agta, Ata, and Batak of the Philippines; the Togucil of Maluku (the Moluccas or “Spice Islands”), the Nuaulu of Scram (in eastern Indonesia), the Andaman Islanders in the Indian Ocean, and various smaller and lesser known groups in Thailand and Vietnam (see Fig. 11.1)

Farmer and Forager Interactions in Southeast Asia

Archaeological studies of foragers in Southeast Asia have overwhelmingly focused on technologies and economies in the pre-Neolithic social landscapes of ‘pure’ foragers of the late Pleistocene or early Holocene. However, there is a growing interest in integrating foragers into archaeological research on the complex social and economic mosaics of early agricultural societies during the Neolithic and Early Metal Age periods, raising significant issues about forager/farmer dichotomies and the nature of traditional models of ‘Austronesian’ expansion. With the advantage of historical and ethnographic sources, there is also a recent expansion of archaeological studies focused on specialized forager forest collectors integrated into the political economies of early historic maritime trading polities like Srivijaya, Kedah, Khmer, the Cham states, and Philippine chiefdoms that were dependent on these groups for export products in the lucrative South China Sea/Indian Ocean trade networks of the late first millennium to mid-second millennium. Archaeological investigations of Southeast Asian foragers in these recent complex social landscapes require regional inquiries that include open settlement sites as well as cave excavations, and techniques of archaeological recovery that address the challenging issues of site visibility and preservation.

Chiefdoms, Archaeology of

Developed as a cross-culturally comparative concept within early to mid-twentieth century cultural evolutionary anthropology and processual archaeology, chiefdoms are defined as smaller scale complex societies that are sometimes intermediate to state development, with centralized decision-making hierarchies, some degree of hereditary social ranking, and economic centralization. In historically and ethnographically known chiefdoms, chiefs generally construct and maintain political power bases through various economic means (tribute collection, control over production and exchange, foreign trade monopolies), ideological means (ritual, myth, sacred landscapes), and military coercion. Archaeologists have recognized that these power strategies are materialized archaeologically in a variety of highly visible ways (such as monumental construction, settlement hierarchies, specialized prestige goods production and exchange, differential household wealth, and indicators of large-scale militarism), and a significant amount of archaeological research has been carried out on the origins, evolution, and organization of chiefdoms in premodern societies of the Near East, Africa, East Asia, Europe, Mesoamerica, South America, North America, and Oceania. However, there is considerable recent debate about the utility of ‘chiefdoms’ as a cross-culturally applicable evolutionary concept, with challenges to this archetype ranging from decoupling elements of ‘chiefdom’ structure, examining these societies at more diverse scales of analysis, and rejecting the ‘chiefdom’ model in favor of a variety of postprocessual approaches in archaeology. This article reviews this controversy and synthesizes current archaeological approaches to sociopolitical structure, political economy, ideology, warfare, and evolutionary transformations in chiefdoms.