| At the time of European contact, the Philippine archipelago was populated by numerous socio-politically complex maritime trading polities linked into the South China Sea-Indian Ocean luxury goods trade and interacting through river-based trade for raw materials with smaller-scale interior swidden farming and foraging groups. While historic records and archaeological work have begun to illuminate dynamic aspects of socio-political structure and economy in the precolonial complex societies of the Philippines, agricultural strategies and human impacts on prehispanic landscapes are little studied and poorly understood. My research involves an interdisciplinary approach using archaeology, geoarchaeology, GIS, and ethnohistory to assess strategies of agricultural intensification and landscape transformation within the Bais-Tanjay River Valley of Negros, Oriental in response to ecological, political, and social factors. |
