Research in archaeology has been multidisciplinary since its beginnings. Methods, theories, tools and techniques from various natural sciences such as Geology, Biology, Chemistry, as well as from the humanities like Architecture, Fine Arts, Ethnology, Sociology, History, and Medicine have been used in archaeological research. While they were at first considered to be ancillary disciplines, recent archaeology has evolved into an interconnected research environment where teams consisting of archaeologists and experts from various disciplines and multiple institutions cooperate and exchange knowledge and expertise, and equally contribute to an inclusive transdisciplinary research environment. The success of such cooperative research has added considerable new knowledge to the concepts and understanding of our deep history.
This is especially the case in the vast region of Southeast Asia, where numerous discoveries have been made in recent years through collaborative works that have changed traditional views of human origins, peopling and expansion. Island Southeast in particular has become a scientific hotspot for deep time archaeology in the last 20 years, with the discovery of hitherto unknown human fossils, the earliest rock art, the settlement of the island world of Wallacea and the discovery of Australia by early modern humans (H. sapiens) and the first seafarers who were capable of navigating over great distances more than 50,000 years ago. These new findings tell us how particular environments and changing climates have influenced, and even triggered the anatomical, behavioral, technological, and cultural evolution of our species over the past 2 million years.
We would like to invite our colleagues from across the archaeological disciplines engaging in collaborative archaeological research in the region of Southeast Asia and beyond to share their experiences, expertise, and knowledge with an audience coming from the various Social Sciences.
TRACES ASIA: Reconstructing Ancient Lifeways and Technologies
Alfred Pawlik
Anthropological and Sociological Initiatives of the Ateneo, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Ateneo de Manila University
Riczar Fuentes
Anthropological and Sociological Initiatives of the Ateneo, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Ateneo de Manila University
TRACES is a Deep Time Archaeological Collaboratory and a transdisciplinary facility for interactive research and instruction within the Anthropological and Sociological Initiatives of the Ateneo (ASIA). Its microscope facility is focused on Traceology, an efficient method for studying the function and use of prehistoric artefacts. Research projects at Traces seek new answers to imminent questions on human cognitive and behavioural evolution, and the related prehistoric technologies and innovations in the course of successful adaptation to changing environments in the Quaternary. Our fundamental idea hereby is to make archaeology and past human activities visible and communicable in the university and in the public domain, which led to the creation of TRACES.
Here, we will introduce the TRACES laboratory and showcase its research projects which have provided significant data and information on the early history of humanity. Traces engages in international and interdisciplinary projects and leads excavations in Mindoro Occidental where sites on the island of Ilin have produced the cultural remains of the first seafarers that travelled to the Philippine archipelago more than 30,000 years ago. The analysis of the oldest stone tools in the Philippines from the Rhinoceros site at Rizal, Kalinga, where early humans hunted and slaughtered a rhinoceros around 700,000 years ago, is another milestone of research at TRACES. A new initiative of TRACES is related to the Kalinga project and investigates the antiquity of the Loyola Heights campus in ADMU itself. We also investigate the behavioural complexity and versatility of the first modern humans (H. sapiens) in Sulawesi where we examine the function of ancient bone and stone tools. They provide us with valuable information about human ability to navigate across the open sea, reach remote islands and adapt to insular and coastal environments before, during and after the last ice age.
Maritime interaction and mobility of early humans in changing environments and climates
Alfred Pawlik
Anthropological and Sociological Initiatives of the Ateneo, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Ateneo de Manila University
Excavations of several sites on the island of Mindoro have produced a variety of information that indicate that Mindoro may have served as a steppingstone for the migration of Homo sapiens into the oceanic islands of the Philippines. Our multidisciplinary project aims to determine how environmental, sea level and land mass variability during the Pleistocene and early Holocene influenced the mobility, subsistence, behaviour and cognitive advances of early human populations, and how these hunter-gatherers utilised the different environments and resources they encountered. Because of its location on the northwestern fringes of Wallacea and its proximity to Borneo, Sulawesi and Taiwan, the Philippines likely acted as a gateway for the movement of people, material culture and ideas between the mainland and the islands of Southeast Asia throughout prehistory. Mindoro, like most of the islands in the Philippine archipelago, lies east of Huxley’s Line, a biogeographic boundary that separates the Sunda shelf region of Southeast Asia and Wallacea, and was never connected by land bridges to the mainland. Cave and rock shelters at the southern end of Mindoro Occidental, closest to Huxley Line, have yielded well-stratified archaeological deposits that can be connected to a radiocarbon chronology from c. 35,000 cal. BP (and possibly much earlier) to c. 500 cal. AD. Cultural material and biological remains retrieved from the Mindoro sites as well as similarly old sites from across the region suggest that the late Pleistocene and early Holocene in particular were a period of increasing mobility, significant social change and technological innovation, and successful adaptation of these early mariners to diverse marine environments.
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Development and future directions of lithic use-wear analysis in Island Southeast Asia
Riczar Fuentes
Anthropological and Sociological Initiatives of the Ateneo, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Ateneo de Manila University
Use-wear, microwear, or traceological analysis is a method in identifying prehistoric tool use of anatomically modern humans and their ancestors. While this method can be applied to any lithic and some non-lithic materials in general, use-wear analysis plays, in particular, an important role in understanding amorphous flake tools from Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) during the Late Pleistocene. The absence of formal tool types, including those that are considered as ‘projectiles’ or ‘hafted’ implements, may have hindered our views regarding the actual role these tools played in the development of cognition, behavioural capacity, and complex technologies in the region. Use-wear analysis of unretouched flakes, however, indicate that these were used in a variety of activities, beyond simple actions such as cutting or scraping. In this paper, we provide an overview of the beginnings and development of use-wear analysis in ISEA. Then, we discuss the role of use wear in addressing issues such as the bamboo hypothesis, ‘complex’ lithic technologies, and chronological development of lithic technology and use. Although technological and traceological studies in the region often highlight the presumed presence of a bamboo technology in the past, there seems to be limited recurring microscopic wear traces that would allow to verify the hypothetical presence of a ‘vegetal technology’ that would make up for the seemingly simple lithic technology in ISEA. An evaluation of the current state of the art and future directions of use-wear analysis attempts to provide context for the current understanding of lithic technology in ISEA. In general, this paper critically examines perspectives on ISEAn prehistory, and illustrates the development of use-wear analysis as a specialisation in archaeology that was established and developed in the region out of necessity.
One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure: An Exploratory Research on the Application of Archaeological Methods in aRehabilitated Sanitary Landfill of Brgy. San Jose Sico, Batangas City, Batangas on Studying Food-Related Waste
Brent Soriano
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Ateneo de Manila University
Archaeology commonly studies the deep human past and associated events through the recovery of artefacts, biofacts and other remains. However, this exploratory research attempts to apply the archaeological methods as well as to reconstruct the human diet practices in the more recent past through excavated assemblages of garbage deposits ("Garbology") in a rehabilitated sanitary landfill located in Batangas City.
Garbology is defined as the study of previously collected waste material in order to identify and learn about the various associated activities of the population in areas that contributed to a garbage deposit. This study will be guided by the Input-Process-Output Model of Waring (1996) which best describes the structure of the process. In this context, the food-related waste from the rehabilitated sanitary landfill is treated as an archaeological record. The retrieval and study of the material require archaeological methods and activities, including site mapping, excavation, stratigraphic recording, and documentation. Thus, the knowledge output for this study is the attempt to reconstruct food acquisition and consumption behavior of the recent past urban-rural communities. This will be the first study of this kind in the Philippines and test case for applying archaeological methods to answer questions of changes in subsistence and nutrition-related behavior, etc. of the contributing population in Batangas City. It will also explore alternative possibilities of absolute dating of the retrieved materials, as Carbon-14 or any other radiometric dating method presumably will not work in this case because their standard error would most likely be larger than the period during which the landfill was active. We expect that this pilot study can show potential opportunities to future researchers who wish to explore the diverse field of garbology in the Philippines.
“To Educate the Locals”: Reflecting on the Relevance of Archaeological Research in the Philippines
Caroline Marie Q. Lising
Goethe University Frankfurt and Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum
Frankfurt, Germany
As questions about the social value of research have come to fore in the recent past, so has the relevance of archaeological research to stakeholders. As a possible reaction to these questions, archaeologists have increasingly become engaged with local stakeholder groups where their sites are located, by choice or otherwise. The realization--brought about by different reasons--that the locals need to be informed and be aware of the research being done in and around their communities has created a mindset among researchers that people need to be educated about their specific projects and archaeology in general. At this juncture, employing critical self-reflection might be necessary to check what the intentions behind this inclination towards “educating the locals”are, and what the impact of these intentions might be when applied. Is it possible for archaeological researchers to fall into the trap—whether consciously or not—of perpetrating neocolonialist, messianic attitudes directed, not only towards indigenous people, but also towards local communities and their governments? What kind of relationships are being developed with the local people, considering that researchers in archaeology are but one of the many stakeholder groups in heritage? A senior archaeologist has been recently quoted saying, “At the end of the day, without social value benefitting the community, the research question belongs to the researcher alone, as do the benefits of this research”. Relevance happens when research benefits others.
The forest behind the stone. Exploring the relationship between humans, stones and plants in Prehistoric Southeast Asia
Hermine Xhauflair
Institución Milá y Fontanals de investigación en Humanidades Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas Carrer de les Egipciaques 15 08001 Barcelona, Spain UMR 7194 Histoire Naturelle de l'Homme Préhistorique Institut de Paléontologie Humaine 1 rue René Panhard 75013 Paris, France
Prehistoric lithic industries in Southeast Asia are characterised broadly speaking by the paucity of formal tool types and simple production techniques. It has been suggested that this might be the consequence of an adaptation to the tropical environment in which human groups lived and that stone artefacts were complemented by a more complex industry made of bamboo. Use-wear analyses of stone tools seem to support this interpretation as many of them show traces related to plant processing. Nevertheless, it is not clear whether these traces are the result of manufacturing bamboo tools or if they are in fact related to processing other plants, pointing to a more diverse exploitation of plant resources and a more holistic adaptation to tropical forests resources by prehistoric groups. To investigate this question, I have been conducting functional analyses of stone tools from the Philippines, developing an interdisciplinary approach, connecting Past and Present