CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS AND TRANSFORMATION OF EARLY HISTORICAL POLITIES ON LUBANG ISLAND, THE PHILIPPINES, CA. A.D. 1200-1800

Abstract

This study explores the nature of culture contact experience of the early historical polities in the Philippines. The historical analysis and the result of the archaeological excavation at Lubang Island allows us to reexamine the entanglements of local populations against the colonial culture and how these entanglements have been perceived, mediated, and even transformed by the actions of native peoples in the past. The present study offers an alternative model for culture contact studies and how to generate questions about human behavior and interaction in the past by using critical analysis of ethnohistorical documents, archaeological data, and anthropological theory.Under the general model of culture contact study and colonialism, the archaeological study focuses on the documentation and analysis of a collection of artifacts and faunal remains excavated from a settlement-fortification site, believed to have been occupied and used from the early A.D. 1200s to the late A.D.1800s.In this dissertation, I use historical data to examine the historical trajectory of local polities on Lubang Island and situate them in a particular context where native people's interactions with other groups define their everyday actions as reflected in the archaeological record. I develop an alternative model using an agency-based approach that focuses on the relationships linking human actors and their behavior in the past. Such a model allows us to rethink the history of Lubang Island and its people according to how they acted and defined themselves. Moreover, the issues of complexity in small-scale polities in the Philipppines need to be teased out in order to elucidate the different levels and scales of complexity in the various historical contexts of early polities in Island Southeast Asia. Only then can we truly understand the variables involved in social reproduction and the ways in which early Filipinos lived and encountered cross-cultural interaction in the past.