The Ifugao Archaeological Project

THE IFUGAO ARE ONE OF several minority groups in the northern Philippines and one of the best documented. They are best known for their rice terraces (Figure 1), which are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the early twentieth century, two prominent figures in Philippine anthropology conducted an intensive investigation of the Ifugao (Barton 1919, 1930; Beyer 1926, 1955). Both scholars proposed a 2,000to 3,000-year-old origin for the Ifugao rice terraces based on their estimates of how long it would have taken to modify the rugged topography of the area. This “long history” has become received wisdom that found its way into textbooks and national histories (Jocano 2001; UNESCO 1995). Others have proposed a more recent origin of the terraces (Table 1). Using evidence from ethnohistoric documents and lexical research, these studies suggest that the terraced landscapes of the Ifugao are the end result of population expansion into the Cordillera highlands in response to Spanish colonization. Lowland–mountain contacts before and after the arrival of the Spanish may have facilitated the movement of lowland peoples into the highlands when the Spanish settled in their locales (Keesing 1962). The Ifugao Archaeological Project (IAP) is a collaborative research program of the Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement (SITMo), the National Museum of the Philippines, the University of the Philippines, the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples–Ifugao, and UCLA. In 2012 and 2013, the IAP conducted two field seasons in Old Kiyyangan Village in Kiangan, Ifugao (Figure 2), aiming to better understand highland–lowland relationships. In 2015 the IAP returned to the area to complete the first phase of its research program. Old Kiyyangan Village is located near the junction of the Ibulao and the Ambangal rivers, southwest of Lagawe, the capital of Ifugao province (Figure 3). Old Kiyyangan Village is thought to be the first village settled by the Tuwali-Ifugao, an Ifugao ethnolinguistic group that later settled in the current town of Kiangan, about 4 km from the archaeological site. Old Kiyyangan Village is prominent in the TuwaliIfugao origin oral tradition, as it is considered the place where the Ifugaos first settled (Beyer 1955). The settlement is first mentioned in 1801 by Fray Molano in a letter to his superior, in which he states that the The Ifugao Archaeological Project