Classics
Review
Apache Farmers, Agta Hunters and Bunong Elephant Keepers: a
Career in Ethnoarchaeology
P. Bion
Griffin,
Emeritus Professor, University of
Hawaii at Manoa (pbiongriffin@gmail.com)
I spent much of my life interested in prehistoric and
modern hunter-gatherer, or forager, societies. This
professional exploration has been through concepts, tools, and passions of some
aspect or another of ethnoarchaeology. An
ecological approach and material focus to modern hunters has led me to seek
both the basis of today’s humid tropics foragers and to consider the many models
associated with human biocultural evolution from the Plio-Pleistocene through
the development of farming.
I believe that a broad four-field
anthropology with considerable seepage and cross-fertilization into related
fields has given archaeologists and ethnographers a solid platform for
researching our hunter-gatherer or forager basis of becoming and
being human. Ethnoarchaeology, like anthropology, is properly a broad, diverse
and multi-faceted field for joining attempts to “know how we know” a cultural
present and a past through patterned material remnants. Ethnoarchaeology, as I comprehend its power, focuses on seeing the behavior
extractable from patterns in the present that may build theoretically solid and
testable alternative models of humans’ patterns in the past. I will tell you in
the following pages how I first began
and now many years later continue my journey through anthropology and ethnoarchaeology. Much of
my story is one of good luck, good timing, and many supportive teachers,
colleagues and students.
<A>Beginnings
The 1960s was an
incredibly intellectually exciting time to begin training in American
archaeology. Anthropological archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and ecological
anthropology provided hotbeds of thinking, innovation, and quarreling in our
field. The Man the Hunter Conference (Lee and DeVore 1968) with its integration
of Plio-Pleistocene hominid behavior with possibilities of the adaptation of
modern hunter-gatherers was a natural synergy for pulling the writings of Marshall
Sahlins (1968) and Sahlins and Elman Service (1960) and Julian Steward (1955) into modeling possible trajectories of social
organization and change among humans from the remotest past through the
Holocene. Jane Goodall (1971) began rewriting our knowledge of our closest
primate kin; Richard Lee (1968, 1969) and Lorna Marshall (1976) opened the
doors to the rewards of living among and reporting on extant hunters. In the
late sixties, I wished to join the club of those showing the new ways of an
innovating post-WWII anthropology by finding “my own” foragers. Moreover, I was
continuing a life’s path many others must have begun in their younger
years.
In
telling my story, I believe I should maintain a personal perspective that reaffirms
the importance of young people being exposed to and encouraged in following
their intellectual dreams. My story begins with interest in anthropology
through early and voluminous reading. I
remember the influence of Chad Oliver’s (anthropologist C. Symmes Oliver) Mists of Dawn science fiction novel
(1952) involving a boy, a malfunctioning time machine, and “the
Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon interface.” Long before Jean Aurel’s Clan of the Cave Bear, (1980) Oliver was weaving a tale that both
inspired the imagination of young readers and pinpointed an anthropological
problem that two generations later still excites us (Finlayson 2009). Mists
of Dawn led to an eighth grade science project on fossil “men,” drawing
heavily on Ruth Moore’s (1953) Man, Time,
and Fossils. I topped the report off by carving a wooden Neanderthal skull
replica. The die were cast, it seems.
As
Malcolm Gladwell (2008) in Outliers: the
Story of Success tells us, some
people are born lucky and find a measure of success due to the year of their
birth and to support from family, friends, professors, and being in the right
places at the right times. I entered the University of Maine following federal
aid to education and the availability
of student loans. Being somewhat unsure
of how to get where I wanted to go, I majored in history (U Maine ’63) until
converted by master teacher Richard Emerick and “Introduction to Anthropology.”
Emerick’s own unpublished films on Inuit plus the Marshall’s film The Hunters (1957) sold me on the
direction I should chart my life. Reading, good films, and great teachers
matter for a future anthropologist and they mattered greatly in my case.
I
began graduate studies at the University of Arizona in the fall 1965 with Bill
Longacre’s core course in archaeology. What a transformative experience it was! Again,
as per Gladwell, the timing was perfect for me. Bill was new to Arizona, the
New Archaeology was coming to a boil, and wild new work was coming out! Through
Bill I encountered this thing call ethnoarchaeology, learned of Dick Gould’s (1969)
ethnoarchaeology in Australia, the insights of the Kalahari Project, Colin
Turnbull’s (1961) social anthropology with Mbuti, James Woodburn (1968) with
the Hadza. Most compelling was the
exploration of aspects of social organization and the world of artifacts. From
the Cibeque area of the Fort Apache reservation came the Apache wickiup
(Longacre and Ayres 1968:151-160). Seeing the wickiup first hand as a student
in 1966 at the Grasshopper Field School further solidified my interests in
social behavior and material culture.
While
establishing a strong foundation in Arizona archaeology, I began to plan for
eventual ethnoarchaeological research. The first chance came working in Cibeque
with Apache elder Dewey Case along with
Mark Leone and Keith Basso (1971) at Chedeskai Farms. Mr. Case walked us over
the abandoned residential and farming landscape where he grew up, explaining
the still standing structural remnants, the fields and their irrigation
ditches, and the subsistence that existed in those early 20th
century days. Mr. Case later invited me to his personal gan curing ceremony in Cibeque, an experience and honor I will
never forget. I was convinced I could never restrict myself to only
excavation-based archaeology, but must work with people and their material
culture. Luck was with me in meeting
this generous man and his pointing me
to a new direction.
While
the lure of further Apache ethnoarchaeology was strong, I left it for other
venues. Again timing favored my
success. In 1969 American universities were hiring
without a care. Three years later the market died, but by then I was in a
career slot in the Department of Anthropology, University of Hawaii. Hawaii had
called with an Assistant Professor position and the agreement that, in addition
to Hawaiian archaeology, I could seek my hunter-gatherers in Southeast Asia. At
this time I was, as were a few others, interested in the relationships of
social unit boundaries, material culture and style in artifacts. The Carter
Ranch and Broken K pueblo researches of Bill Longacre (1970) and Jim Hill (1970)
respectively fostered an ethnoarchaeological concern with style. The pueblo
studies had suggested correlations of social unit residence and the patterned
distribution of elements of style in ceramics. Scholars began fanning out among
societies still producing various traditional materials; the Kalinga project
was begun (Longacre and Skibo 1994 and others), Polly Weissner researched among
the Kalahari Bushmen (Weissner 1977) as did John Yellen (1977) Kent Flannery
and Frank Hole’s Iranian village archaeology may have spurred the
ethnoarchaeology of an Iranian Village (Kramer 1982). Claudia Chang (1992,
1993), whose research has long influenced me, focused her early
ethnoarchaeology on pastoralists in Macedonia.
<A> Agta Hunter
Gatherer Research
As a junior faculty
member at the University of Hawaii, I was directed by the late Henry Lewis to the
Agta of Palanan, Isabela Province, Philippines and to scattered groups of these
hunter-gatherers living in family clusters along the beaches and up the rivers
into the mountain interiors. Men in loincloths, beads, armed with bows and
arrows…what more could an aspiring ethnoarchaeologist want? On first visiting
one remote valley in 1972, I felt as if I had walked into the earliest
Neolithic with its tiny plots of root crops and grains adjacent to palm frond lean-tos.
In the mountain interiors, I was among the Philippine’s last true hunters. And,
the several groups of Agta made an amazing assortment of arrowhead designs.
This was the perfect place to begin ethnoarchaeology. I was interested in two
foci: foragers and their adaptation in a humid tropics environment and the
nature of style in their arrow complex. Finally, north of Palanan in Cagayan
Province, as I visited a campsite, two women walked in carrying bows and
arrows. Asking what they were up to, I got the answer “They’ve been hunting” (Figures 1 and 2). Wait a minute – the Man the
Hunter conference said…men hunt, women gather…for the next few years my wife
and I, accompanied by our son and eventually with students, concentrated on
arrow style, settlement pattern, ecological adaptation, and on Agta women
hunters.
Insert
Figures 1 and 2 here: NOTE: THE FIGURES ARE PRESENTLY AT THE END OF THE PAPER.
Figure 1.
Two young Agta women in an ambush position during hunting.
Figure 2. Taytayan, an
Agta grandmother and superb hunter, draws her bow during a forest hunt.
After
securing funding from Wenner-Gren, the National Science Foundation and the
University of Hawaii, we began our ethnoarchaeological research, living with
several different family clusters of Agta within the municipality of Palanan.
This first major fieldwork began in June 1974 and ended in February 1976, excluding
R&R in Manila.
The
Agta are an ethno-linguistic unit of people residing along both sides of the
Sierra Madre, a chain of mountains running the length of eastern Luzon (Estioko
and Griffin 1975; Estioko-Griffin 1986, 1985, 1984; Estioko-Griffin and P. Bion
Griffin 1981a, 1981b; P. Bion Griffin
1997, 1989, 1984; P. Bion Griffin and Marcus B. Griffin 2000). Popularly
known as “Negritos,” or small blacks, and as “Dumagats,” people by the sea,
they are among the various related dialect groups scattered along the beaches,
up the rivers into the mountain interiors, and over the divide along the
western flanks of the mountains above farmer’s settlements. Of special interest
is a “rough” territorial clustering of dialect and sub-dialect groups of
related Agta; once we learned the dialect boundaries, we knew we could compare
kinship, language, and style variation in arrowheads and perhaps other
artifacts.
Agta
are of special interest to an ethnoarchaeologist seeking to work with material
culture in the context of non-western technology, some degree of traditional
continuity with a foraging lifestyle and separation from more complex
societies. The Aga adequately fit these criteria. They live in family clusters
of three, four, or five nuclear families with three generations usually present.
They dwell in temporary shelters that vary in style and location depending on
the season and on subsistence activity undertaken. Their food getting
technology has adopted new materials yet functions largely as earlier technologies
did. They emphasize hunting of wild pig, deer, monkey, lesser game, and fish in
the rivers and ocean littoral zones. They gather shellfish, honey, an
assortment of forest plant foods, and often plant small plots of maize, upland
rice, sweet potato, cassava, and miscellaneous vegetables and fruits, such as
pineapple. Their planted foods are not
adequate for year around consumption needs.
Meat and fish are traded to non-Agta farmers for basic carbohydrates, most preferably rice.
Seasonality forces settlement and subsistence shifts that lead to great
potential in ethnoarchaeological explorations. A dry season has intermingling
typhoons; a rainy monsoon season comes at the coldest time of year: November
through January. During the latter, people may congregate into somewhat larger
residential clusters with small post houses placed where flooded rivers,
landslides, and falling trees cannot harm the occupants. In the dry season
small lean-to shelters usually are placed
on beaches near fresh water outlets or on dry riverbeds beside the diminished
rivers and streams. Wild pigs are fattest and most desirable during the rainy
season; deer and fish dominate the drier months. Flooded rivers cannot be fished,
since most fishing is by underwater spear use.
In
addition, variation among Agta groups along lines of subsistence emphases adds ethnological interest. Some groups
live relatively near lowland farmers, engage in frequent exchange, and often
are paid laborers in fields. A few family groups maintain traditional
territories in the mountain interior, depending mostly on hunting, riverine
fishing, and collection of wild plant foods.1 All this added up
starting in 1974 to fascinating ethnography and ethnoarchaeology.
The
Agta research began as ethnoarchaeology; interests were primarily in stylistic
variation in projectile points, in the patterns of activities on the landscape,
and on subsistence activities (Figure 3). These were briefly reported in the 1970s, following
research from mid-1974 through early 1976. Aside from an arrow point related
article in the magazine Archaeology (1978),
the publications described subsistence patterns, variations among Agta groups,
and considerations of an adaptation minimally involving horticulture. The paper
in Olofson’s 1981 Adaptive Strategies and
Change in Philippine Swidden-based Societies (“The Beginning of Cultivation
among Agta Hunter-Gatherers in Northeast Luzon”) presented an explanation of
variation in commitment to cultivation of crops among Palanan Agta. Other
articles looked more closely at variation among Agta groups. Unfortunately, the
promised analysis of variation in arrowhead shape and social variables has
never been published.2 This is in spite of many hours of students’
work at metric description and
on-paper tracings of arrowheads and the collection of arrows itself. A lengthy
chapter describing Agta arrows is found in Estioko-Griffin (1984) and an
updated analysis is in Heide Knecht’s edited volume Projectile Technology (1997). “Technology and Variation in Arrow
Design among the Agta of Northeastern Luzon” provides the springboard for an
eventual and hopefully relevant correlation of metrically derived variation of
arrows among the various dialect groups ranging through the two provinces.
Insert
Figure 3 here Griffin tracing Agta arrowheads for later analyses
The
subsistence and settlement data has, in retrospect, proven more valuable to our
general knowledge of hunter-gatherer societies than to modeling Plio-Pleistocene
hominin organization. Perhaps the one area of Agta research that speaks ethnoarchaeologically
to
prehistoric hunters, as well as to theories of gender organization, came out of
the research inspired by the Agta’s comment in 1972, when the two women walked
into camp with bows and arrows, “They have been hunting.” The “woman the
hunter” research initially drew less on then current interests in the
anthropology of women than on the notion that possibilities in the formation of
human societies and of gender organization in the Pleistocene could be
elucidated by the Agta case. As work progressed, however, the lure of the
Pleistocene model faded and the importance of the Agta gender system grew.
We
introduced Agta women hunters before the main period of fieldwork, introducing
“woman the hunter” in Florence Dahlberg’s edited volume Woman the Gatherer (1981). We laid out what we knew and planned to
learn. At this time, interest in women’s roles in non-western societies was
burgeoning and we were lucky to have good timing. In addition, the anthropology
of hunters-gatherers was maturing, with several theoretical approaches well developed. Evolutionary ecology
raised questions about the viability of women as hunters: too dangerous, would
affect reproductive success, women foragers more productive in gathering and
childcare, and so on. The power of these arguments helped drive a deep look
into the real nuts and bolts of women who did or did not hunt, and to what else
they did, especially in reproduction. As in the ethnoarchaeology of 1974-76, in
1980-82 Agnes Griffin, Marcus Griffin (wife and son) and I began teamwork among
a Cagayan Province group especially known for its women hunters. We also
continued recording arrowhead data and collecting specimens.
The
ethnoarchaeology of women hunters, and of all members of the camps, was
designed to quantitatively understand men’s, women’s, and children’s
participation in subsistence activities, to explore demographic variables
associated with child bearing and child rearing, and to look at variations
within the population. We reasoned that if women were successful hunters, did
not succumb to dangers, and still reproduced and raised children, we could both
suggest that an elaboration of the “woman the gatherer” model was realistic,
that the model might be archaeologically tested among Pleistocene societies,
and should expand our knowledge of women’s gender roles among traditional
societies. In addition, we suggested we might find male’s roles as both
supportive and complementary of women’s roles. Lastly, we wanted to inquire
into child rearing and childcare practices, and to relate those to the women’s subsistence
work.
The
research to satisfy those ends demanded sampling detailed work activities,
including all subsistence tasks, travel, and childcare. In addition, fertility
records and body fat measurements were appropriate. Each woman provided
information on menarche
age, on failed and live births, children’s mortality, and her own weight, height, and, through skin
fold measurements, body fat. Women who often, seldom, and never hunted were
compared. The “who, what, when, where and how” of hunting, fishing,
gathering, horticulture, hired labor, childcare, and rest/play were recorded
over about twenty months of fieldwork. Distance travel was estimated, animal
kills were weighed and distribution noted, and joint activities recorded. Technology used was detailed. The idea was to
find similarities, differences, and variations between and among men and women.
Agnes, Marcus and I lived with our host Agta, building our own rattan-frond
thatched “house” (or
lean-to in season), engaging in data recording and participant observation. We
spoke the dialects of the Agta groups hosting us and shared what they ate,
or didn’t eat. We traveled
on some hunting trips and joined in on “the kill” occasionally. We traveled widely at times, building a
census for the region, collecting data on women, and talking about women and
their work. The anthropologists’ lives were, at least looking back,
wonderful and the Agta were gracious and enthusiastic hosts. What more could an
anthropologist want? Never mind illnesses, hunger, weight loss, and discomfort;
they are all good for one (at least
looking back in time).
The results of the Agta Woman the Hunter
project are, in my opinion, our principal and most significant research
contributions to ethnoarchaeology and to anthropology in general. We
demonstrated, in spite of the naysayers, that some Agta women are successful
hunters and they also birth and raise children. Among hunter-gatherers, at
least in certain environments, women may undertake work that is reserved for
men in other societies and environments. Variation is a rule and women do not
hunt exactly as do men among the Agta. Some Agta women, and this varies among
groups and residential clusters, and especially in subsistence option contexts,
do not hunt, period. Others love to hunt. Some women who were never seen to
hunt, claimed to be able to do so, but chose not to.
The women who hunt the most, and
bring in the most kills, are young grandmothers. Mothers with babies on their
backs may opportunistically hunt, or at least kill a game animal that they
happen upon while gathering or traveling. They are nearly always armed with at
least a long knife. In our study, women brought in more kills than did men, but
the weights of individual kills were less than those secured by men. The
biggest, most dangerous wild pigs tended to be found through solitary stalking
or ambushing. Women almost never hunted alone; sisters, husband and wife, aunt
and younger niece, or some other combination was the rule. Women usually hunted
with dogs. The dogs helped find and channel the deer or pigs to the waiting hunters.
Men and women were not differentiated in terms of prestige, influence, or place
in the family group. No one was lauded for hunting success; the person who
killed an animal usually did not carry it into camp, but he or she did usually
butcher and divide the carcass. Each household received the same allotment of
meat (or fish), including the anthropologists, but since everyone was related,
cooked meat made a second casual redistribution to make sure children were fed.
The anthropologists always sent our cooked monkey meat to children. It looked too human for our tastes!
The Agta women and their hunting came
at a great time. The anthropology of women found the work interesting; the
general reading public also tuned in. The widest distribution came through
Agnes Griffin ‘s (1986) paper in Natural History magazine: “Daughters
of the Forest”. Reprinted
in several undergraduate anthropology collections over the years, this
introductory article has steered scholars and non-scholars towards the
available publications. Griffin et al. (1985) and Goodman et al. (1985) take us
deeply into the relationships of Agta female hunting practices and their
reproductive characteristics. These\ data speak to the hunting capacities of
women in other hunting based societies, past and present. Surprisingly, an
internet search reveals that the early (1981) article in the edited volume
Woman the Gatherer has attracted more academic attention than later and more
detailed papers. Some papers do probe back to prehistoric and even Pleistocene
societies in queries about gender roles and women hunting. Even Neanderthal
women have not escaped! So, perhaps the
issue of women hunters will continue to help build archaeological models of
temporally remote societies.
The publications have argued that
forager adaptations to the humid tropics often vary in important ways from the
arid tropics or northern temperate regions. Gender lines may be less rigidly
drawn. In Southeast Asian forests women tend to share most of the work that men do; Agta men often cook and tend
children, especially if more than one youngster is present in a nuclear family.
Decision-making is a family affair conducted over the morning or evening
campfire. We suggest that in some environmental contexts in the Pleistocene we
cannot exclude females from major roles in subsistence beyond “woman the gatherer.” Did Homo erectus of earlier females
hunt, and if so, what are the implications for the developing human family
system? Fire and cooking, story-telling, language, and art and dance may have
played their roles, but perhaps so did women procuring foods through hunting. Aspects of Agta adoption of very
modest horticulture may shed insights to jungle use by terminal Pleistocene
foragers. Agta, for example, may plant tiny plots of root crops at scattered
locations throughout their domains. In time of need or with a happenstance
passing by, the few roots may be dug and cooked for a meal. Likewise, the small
plots of upland rice, cassava, and maize seen in our work show the processes of
integrating plant cultivation with hunting, fishing and wild food gathering.
The harvests are small, may be shared widely, and suffice for food only at
specific times of the year. This is a model of a shift from solely foraging to
an emphasis on horticulture.
Contemporary anthropological issues
in gender studies have drawn the Agta women into debates ranging from
psychology to area studies. These are a far cry from ethnoarchaeology, to be
sure, but ethnoarchaeology results can find homes in many places. For example, I recall Carol Kramer’s (1982) book Village
Ethnoarchaeology: Rural Iran in Archaeological Perspective was pointed out
in a US Army Human Terrain System context as a good way to possibly study an
Afghan village – especially noted was the village map
enclosed in the book.3 Thomas Headland and Lawrence Reid
built off questions of Agta subsistence options projected over the last several
thousand years and developed the “wild yam” hypothesis (Headland 1987; Headland and Reid 1989). The
hypothesis questioned the viability of the humid tropics for foragers without
farming trade partners. Agta ethnoarchaeology helped foster the debates and
tropics wide research.
Other Agta ethnoarchaeology
undertaken remains incomplete. In 1987, I was intrigued by the orthodoxy that
North American Clovis mammoth hunters utilized spears or atlatl cast shafts,
headed by the classic Clovis fluted points. Clovis points are big, heavy and
well-suited to their tasks. I thought that the case for NOT using the points on
arrows, cast by bows, was arguable. I secured several skillfully flaked and
accurate replicas and took them to my Agta friends, who stated they certainly
would work on arrows, but “They’d
break too easily.” Agta steel arrowheads are often larger
and heavier than Clovis points, as are a variety of ethnographically known
arrow assemblages. One Agta, Tomba, an old friend, took it upon himself to
mount the “Clovis”
points on shafts as he, not I, saw fit. I photographed and annotated each step.
The end result was a fletched hard wood shaft with a wooden insert shaft to
which the point was bound with a meter long cord. The cord connected the
secondary shaft to the main arrow shaft. The principle is that the point would
penetrate into an animal, then the main shaft would fall off to catch on
vegetation while the line played out. When the line fetched up, the arrow point
would stay inside the animal, causing more damage. Since hunting and procuring
wild pig and deer by the Agta is a daily necessity of life, we decided not to
use the points in actual hunting, and I baulked at buying a local domestic pig
on which to try out the arrows’ power. In any case, a big pig is
still not a small mammoth.4, That Clovis points make fine arrowheads
demonstrates little except the early Native American hunters could have, technically
speaking, used bows to launch Clovis points attached to arrow shafts. If the
Agta could do it, other hunters could too. The details remain to be published.
During
the Agta research in 1982, I took a break to be a senior advisor for the
Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN) ethnoarchaeology field school run by
the National Museum of the Philippines in Atulu, Iguig, Cagayan. The villagers
made paddle and anvil earthenware pottery that they sold around the province.
The entire process from digging clay in the nearby Cagayan riverbanks to firing
in open air, wood-burning piles, was as traditional as it can get. My advising
on analyses of design elements in the ceramic assemblages surely had Emil Haury
thrashing in his grave in Arizona; his take on my knowledge of ceramics back in
graduate school days was well known!5 With junior professionals
attending from around Southeast Asia, many conversations and views on how to
understand ethnoarchaeology were a daily affair.
Between
1992 and 1994, I Directed the UH Center for Southeast Asian Studies. In that
capacity we secured a Henry Luce Foundation grant that funded our faculty,
graduate students, and undergraduate students as well as junior faculty at
Universitas Pattimura in Ambon, Maluku, Indonesia. We together undertook a
cross-disciple study of the cultural, environmental, and economic contexts of
the indigenous sago palm, a principle food source. As noted below, doctoral
student Kyle Latinis undertook an enthnoarchaeological study of tribal
arboriculture on the Island of Seram, while Ken Stark did doctoral research in the
archaeology of subsistence of early foragers, initiating an investigation into
the providence of tropical forests’ carbohydrates in pre-horticultural contexts
(Latinis and Stark 2005).
Mentoring Students
While I value my Agta research in its many aspects, and
especially in ethnoarchaeology and gender studies, I equally value the
achievements of my University of Hawaii students. These scholars and their
researches make my contributions take second place. Certainly, I am especially
proud of my anthropologist wife’s Agta publications, and my son’s own doctorate (University of Illinois, Anthropology,
1996) on Agta kinship and culture change. My students deserve special
discussions herein as many are relevant to ethnoarchaeology. Tom Headland (1987), Navin Rai (1982), Karen Mudar (1985),
Connie Clark (1990), and Melinda Allen (1985) all wrote important contributions
concerning the Agta. While by and large ethnographies, the work develops the
foundations the Griffins build that apply to ethnoarchaeology.
Tom Headland is a premier and decades
long scholar of Agta culture; his doctoral dissertation under
my supervision built on decades
of living with and studying Agta in Casiguran south of Palanan. His early-unpublished
description of Agta arrows inspired me to pursue the subject in depth. His
challenging any of my facile statements kept the level of my
research at top- level. The Agta women in Casiguran did not hunt in the
fashion of those in Cagayan; his queries forced close attention to detail.
Navin Rai (1982) resisted pressure to
return to Nepal and study an indigenous society there, instead insisting on
working with a “different” culture. I plunked him down with a remote group of Agta on
the western side of the Sierra Madre, people who were related to the folk I
studied in the 1970s, and he produced a great volume on those Agta. His data on subsistence, mobility, exchange, and marriage
allowed in depth modeling of variation in Agta society
Connie Clark (1990) followed our stay in
Cagayan, living among the same families and
looking at new variations in subsistence strategies. Karen Mudar (1985) and
Melinda Allen (1985) joined us in the Cagayan fieldwork for a time in 1981. Melinda, a part of the original
grant, was the team botanist. She collected and helped identify the economic
plants of the forest, giving a solid knowledge of the use of tropical forest
flora (Allen
1985). Karen, an archaeologist, collected
wild pig skulls and mandibles and related cultural data for her zoology master’s degree on Sus
barbatus, the wild pig hunted by the Agta.
Her aging and sexing the crania provided additional data for the carcass weight
measures we collected whenever possible (Mudar 1985). The sample of skulls and mandibles
was much larger than the weighed animals sample, given the Agta custom of
keeping mandibles as trophies. A portion of the specimens were sampled for DNA
in the quest to trace the Southeast Asian spread of pigs and to delimit genetic
lines of pigs, especially as related to human movement through the archipelago.
(Larson 2007) I’m pleased to have played a minor role in the controversy
over the origins and spread of the Proto-Austronesian speaking peoples.
Lye Tuck Po (1997) would not call her
doctoral research among the Batek of Pahang, Malaysia, ethnoarchaeology, but
her sophisticated ethnography feeds directly into the understanding of Agta
adaptations to the Philippines humid tropics. Comparison among foragers in the
same general geographic area and environment allows insights into variations as
well as similarities. Indeed, the Batek and similar groups in Malaysia show
strong similarities in gender assignments of labor when compared with Agta (K.
Endicott 1981).
Ethnoarchaeology took a new twist
with Barbara Moir’s (1989) stay on Taku’u Island, a Polynesian Outlier deep in the heart of
Melanesia. Barbara investigated ongoing and past use of the huge Tridacna gigas, a bivalve shell used
both as “cultivated” fauna for consumption and the shell
as tool material, especially adzes. The shell adzes performed both practical
and symbolic function. Barbara’s research had applications to the
archaeology of Polynesians’ adaptations to small atolls with
scare resources and limited plant cultivation potentials. Akira Goto (1986),
another specialist in Polynesian archaeology, brought ethnoarchaeology to bear
on Polynesian fishing and fishing technology.
Kyle Latinis (1999,
2000) completed a major project in
ethnoarchaeology while living in the interior of Seram, Indonesia. He produced
an understanding of arboriculture in a forest context and dug deeply into the
technology of sago palm production. Contributions were made to the archaeology
of the spread of humans through the archipelago and into the Pacific and to
buttressing the case for continued sago cultivation. Kyle’s researched included ethnographic and historical dynamics
of arboreal-based subsistence economies particularly in Maluku and Greater Near
Oceania.
Bertell Davis (n.d.) undertook what
arguably may be the most extreme stretch in ethnoarchaeology by going back and
forth on Vietnamese water management change and the development of the classic
Khmer water reservoir system. Bert, one of my more unorthodox students, put
boots on the ground while a member of a military/civilian team recovering US Airmen’s remains from crash sites in Vietnam and on other trips
talked with Khmer farmers while walking over the present day remaining
Angkorian water systems. The ethnoarchaeology paid off with new insights into
the relationships of the Western Baray and its use, or lack thereof, for
irrigation.
Most
recently, Stephen Acabado (2012, 2010) distilled archeology, ethnography, GIS
analyses, and work with informants on site to understand the origins,
technology, and functions of the famous Ifugao rice terraces around Banawe, the
Philippines. His ongoing, long-term
study shows the intimacy possible through ethnoarchaeology in attacking such a
complex problems as the agricultural terrace systems in Southeast Asia.
A reviewer of an early draft of this
paper charged me with ignoring my roles as an administrator and as a teacher at
the University of Hawaii, arguing that readers should appreciate the need for
researchers and teachers to also accept the usually onerous duties of “helping out” in departmental and college administration. Early in this paper I
noted the influences of great teachers on my career. I was Chair of the Department of
Anthropology during the terrible budget cut years of 1996-2001. I recall the budget and faculty position
retention efforts of myself and my ally, archaeologist Michael Graves, then the
Special Assistant to the Vice President and Vice Chancellor anthropologist
Carol Eastman, as we hammered away on the College of Social Sciences Dean, Dick
Dubanoski. Of the departments in the college, anthropology alone lost no
positions as we struggled to maintain our reputation and quality as a leading
Pacific-Asia oriented program. I suspect
Dick thought Michael and I were a bit unreasonable and rough on him, but that
was our job! Administration is largely managing social relations in order to
achieve one’s goals. Given the fractious nature
of departmental faculties, a chairperson’s job is thankless, at least while it
is ongoing. Dick eventually decided to solve the problem by making me his
Associate Dean, and Michael moved to the chair’s
position. From my new position, I was
supposed to not favor my own department, but anthropology runs deeply in the
blood! One thing is for sure, however. Maintaining a serious research profile
while “chairing” or “deaning” is decidedly difficult.
As soon as I hit the old “working class” magic age of 65, I retired with an extensive if leisurely
research agenda in place and funded. I do not regret the years of
administration since I was able to have positive effects on the department
while still advising students.
Early in this paper, I noted the influences of
great teachers on my career. Equally
important in my mind it undergraduate and graduate teaching. While devotion to
quality teaching may not bring academic fame, my own debt to my teachers always
kept me emphasizing teaching. I especially enjoyed teaching introductory
undergraduates. So many special and appreciative students entered my life
through those classes, sometime even taught in the local movie theater. The
highlight of my final year was to be the recipient of the first “Graduate Mentor’ award of the University of Hawaii.
With that, new research became possible, along with a permanent residential
move from Hawaii to the Philippines, and close to my Agta friends.
Moving Into the Future
My own love of and belief in the value of long-term field
research now leads me back to the Agta, working in a team again with my son,
Marcus, and wife, Agnes. The drifting away from Agta in the 1990s grew out of
regret over many of my friends killed as a result of guerilla warfare in the area, of the need for
fresh perspectives, and because of new opportunities involving funding in
Indonesia and Cambodia. I am now especially interested to see how Agta
technology has changed and how a likely greater emphasis on farming has moved
their subsistence practices, residential patterns, and mobility away from a
forager mode.
That said, another ethnoarchaeology and ethnography project
is now in progress and will continue off and on over the next few years. In
2005 and 2006, I secured initial funding and began the research project “The Ethnography of Cambodian Elephant Husbandry (2009-10)”. The goal of the project is both ethnographic, as in all
my work now, and ethnoarchaeological. Beginning in 1995, I co-headed the
University of Hawaii/East-West Center/Royal University of Fine Arts program in
the archaeology, anthropology, art history and architecture of Cambodia. This
led me to overseeing the program’s involvement in Cambodian
archaeology and inevitably into interest in the evolving Khmer society between
300 b.c.e. to 1300 c.e. From that I wanted to understand the place of animals
in the society, and especially the ubiquitous working elephant. I found living,
working elephants and realized that little anthropology existed on this fabulous
animal and its place in ancient Asian kingdoms. The only answer was to
undertake my own research. I initially combined working among the elephant
keeping Bunong people of Mondul Kiri Province, Cambodia with training in
Thailand on elephant driving and care. We have participant observation again,
an approach to anthropology I hold essential for any work I could conceive.
The research starts from the
elephant, in my case. My University of Arizona professor Jim Downs in his
Ethnology of Pastoral People course stated that if one is to understand an
animal keeping people, one must understand their animals. I took that to heart.
Eventually I will, hopefully, understand the possible dynamics of
human-elephant interactions, work possibilities and limitations. A further goal
is to take the ancient Khmer record and place the elephant in the context of
the development of that agrarian state society. Another goal is to record the
place of the elephant in traditional cultures, to the extent that traditional
cultures are still extant.6 Moving beyond Mondul Kiri Province,
planned research includes southern Lao and, if possible, Burma. The Asian
elephant was once a war machine as well as a draft animal pulling logs, hauling
harvests, and carrying passengers through jungle fastness. Today’s elephants among the Bunong still are a farm animal, not
unlike the American draft horse, and is in harness for all but warfare. The
Bunong once captured wild elephants for breaking and then service with the
Khmer royalty. I cannot study this part of the people’s work, since capture is illegal and severely punished.
But, elephants’ work should allow estimation of
their inputs and outputs in centuries past. The reputed 4000 elephants once
resident at the King’s city at Angkor may eventually be
understood through ethnoarchaeology (Griffin 2000).
Reflections on the power of
ethnoarchaeology to bring knowledge into archaeology return me to the
foundations of four-field anthropology and to cross-fertilization from many of
the natural and social sciences. I have interests in animal-human interactions
in general, hence the elephant husbandry project. Southeast Asian pigs have
also been considered (Griffin 1998). In the Agta work, we dealt with wild pig
and deer biology and behavior, with the Luzon forest ecosystem, with
climatology, land form change, human biology and demography, and, yes, even
kinship. Actually, kinship analyses,
long out of favor with anthropologists, are central to seeking patterns of
variation among classes of arrow style and socio-linguistic boundaries. Site
formation processes and the distribution of residues depend on a long-term
understanding of rainfall patterns, the effects of typhoons, observations on
discard and subsequent taphonomic processes. Even what dogs do to residues,
artifacts, and the surface of the sites
is absolutely critical. As with elephants among the Bunong, dogs among the Agta
must be observed and considered in the creation of archaeological sites.
The permeability or irrelevance of
boundaries; knowledge of the inter relationships of human behavior, the
artifact world, and the environment, apprehended and interacted with- material
as culturally constructed and contextualized in the external world, the
external world as a material creation of people
Some have said the Agta research is
barely ethnoarchaeology. I disagree. Ethnoarchaeology must be a hugely broad
field of inquiry and of theory building. Myriads of types of testable models
applicable to the archaeological record must be possible. The adaptations to
the humid tropics of Asia may be better approached through an understanding of
the Agta, as well as of the Batek, the Onge, the Jarawa, and others. Simply the
realization that in some cases females as hunters may be an adaptive advantage
allows new ideas brought to Pleistocene studies and to gender issues in
archaeology and the general social sciences.
My career as an ethnoarcheologist has
been eclectic. This is due in part to the luck of opportunities, the influence
of students, colleagues, and teachers, as well as a firm belief that diversity
of experience and wide interests make an anthropologist, ethnoarchaeological or
otherwise, better. Engaging in ethnological studies has been important in this.
I am fortunate to be part of a mode of inquiry that sheds light on the human
condition and the many ways it is expressed. I have done my best to foster the
excitement in students I first felt and continue to experience “doing” anthropology. I am grateful to them
for their inspiration and look forward to interesting fieldwork and learning
yet to come.
Notes
1. These
characterizations apply for the time period from 1972 through 1995. Agta
culture has changed over time; some individuals now have cell phones, speak
English, and live much as their lowland Filipino counterparts. One “Beauty
Queen” pageant winner recently surfaced. An Agta, Juliet Chavez of Palanan, in
2005 became the town’s Sabutan Festival Queen.
2. Collected specimens of
Agta arrows from two provinces numbers 166; paper tracings with associated
social data number over 300. These await final publishing, being stored in my
research facility in the Philippines. Mea
culpa
3. In reality, no such
undertaking has been attempted. Seldom are HTT members in a village for any
length of time.
4. Back in graduate
school in those glorious Clovis days, I recall C. Vance Haynes thinking of
getting a team together to go to Africa to experiment with a Clovis killing of
an (old? sick? unsuspecting?) elephant. I of course wanted to join, but I
graduated and left for Hawaii. Can’t win them all.
5. Dr. Haury as a member
of the National Academy of Sciences was an
advisor to the NASA team that
planned a mid-1980s manned trip to Mars and considered including an
archaeologist in the crew. Dr. Haury suggested I go. I do not think he had ethnoarchaeology
in mind.
6. The use of elephants
in the Southeast Asian royal courts is nearly extinct. Elephants are used in
logging in Burma and Laos. Scattered tribal groups still maintain working
elephants. Most elephants in Thailand are used in tourism.
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