Archaeology of the Philippines


The archaeology of the Philippines is the study of past societies in the territory of the modern Republic of the Philippines, an island country in Southeast Asia, through material culture.

History

Colonial period

Very little archaeological work was carried out in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, even though the Spaniards were interested in the people of the islands from an ethnographic and linguistic perspective. Explorers such as Fedor Jagor, Joseph Montano and Paul Ray, and Jose Rizal, occasionally reported visiting sites, but the only detailed investigation was carried out by French archaeologist Alfred Marche in 1881. Commissioned by the French government, Marche conducted systematic surveys of burial caves on two islands, accumulating a large collection of antiquities which is now held in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris.
The most influential early figure in the archaeology of the Philippines was American anthropologist H. Otley Beyer. Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States in 1898, and the American colonial administration actively encouraged the anthropological study of the archipelago. Beyer was therefore invited to establish the University of the Philippines' anthropology department in 1914. Early surveys and collections were carried out in the 1920s by Beyer, Dean C. Worcester, and Carl Guthe. Various private collectors and amateur archaeologists also accumulated significant amounts of material, but Beyer lamented that "none of this work was very scientifically done".
The first major archaeological project in the Philippines was the Rizal-Bulacan Archaeological Survey, prompted by the discovery of finds during the construction of the Novaliches Dam in Rizal Province. Beyer opened substantial excavations in the area of the dam, employing up to seventy workers a day for six months. He also conducted a five-year survey of the surrounding area, cataloguing 120 sites and nearly 500,000 artefacts. In 1932, Beyer assisted F. G. Roth in beginning a second major project, the Batangas Archaeological Survey, which involved surveys and excavation in the Cuenca region. He also collected material from a number of localities around the islands throughout the 1930s and early 1940s.
American colonial archaeology in the Philippines came to an end in 1941 when the islands were occupied by the Japanese. Beyer was interned by the occupying forces, although he was allowed to continue his work at the university. During this time he compiled two synoptic papers, 'Outline review of Philippine archaeology by islands and provinces' and Philippine and East Asian Archaeology, which laid the foundation for subsequent Philippine archaeology.

Post-independence

The Philippines gained independence from the United States in the 1946, but Beyer continued at his post at the University of Philippines until 1954. In 1949 he was joined by Wilhelm Solheim.

Notable sites and discoveries

Stone Age

Palaeolithic

Architecture

Indigenous Architecture
Hindu-Buddhist
Although some 20th century historians believed that the various cultures of the Philippine archipelago first encountered Hindu and/or Buddhist beliefes as early as the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE, more recent scholarship suggests that these cultural influences mostly filtered in during the 10th through the early 14th centuries. Present-day scholarship believes these religious and cultural influences mostly came through trade with Southeast Asian thassalocratic empires such as the Srivijaya and Majapahit, which had in turn had trade relationships with India.
Scholars such as Milton Osborne emphasise that despite these beliefs being originally from India, they reached the Philippines through Southeast Asian cultures with Austronesian roots.
Artifacts reflect the iconography of the Vajrayana Buddhism and its influences on the Philippines's early states.
found in 1989 suggests Indian cultural influence in the Philippines by the 9th century AD, likely through Hinduism in Indonesia, prior to the arrival of European colonial empires in the 16th century.

Ships

Indigenous utensil artifacts

Porcelain tradeware
Porcelain tradeware from Vietnam, Taiwan, and China were so prevalent during the Philippines "late metal age" that early scholars of Philippine anthropology came to refer to the period as the Philippines' "Porcelain age." Before the discovery of the Laguna Copperplate Inscription in the early 1990s, anthropologist, the richness of historical clues which could be derived from these porcelain artifacts led scholars to use the term "protohistory." The Iron Age consisted of a phase called the "Porcelain Age," and porcelain in this phase entered the Philippines around the nineteenth century A.D. along with "glazed stoneware" from Southeast Asia.

Spanish colonial period

, one of the oldest Christian relics in the Philippines.
nobility depicts in the Boxer Codex.
at night.