Detour into prehistory

While people are complaining about recent flooding and railing against corruption and ghost projects of the Department of Public Works and Highways, I’m hoping that prehistoric artifacts will be found when floodwaters recede. Over the years, I have heard of Chinese porcelain, gold jewelry, trade beads, etc., found after heavy rainfall in the Visayas and Mindanao. I saw some of these artifacts in the short interval, when runners brought them to Ermita antique shops before disappearing into private collections. These fired my interest in Philippine prehistory.

When you ask people what they associate with the word “prehistoric,” the top answer will be “dinosaurs” and “cavemen.” While my generation associated prehistory with the cartoon series “The Flintstones,” another generation will probably remember the dinosaurs from “Jurassic Park.” We must remember that prehistory refers to the time before recorded or written history. If our earliest written document is the ninth-century Laguna Copper Plate Inscription, preserved at the National Museum of Anthropology, then our history begins with Year 822 of the Saka era, which translates into Monday, April 21, 900.

If we reckon history with early man in the Philippines, then our prehistory goes back 700,000 years. The so-called “Philippine Adam” used to be the “Tabon Man,” whose remains were excavated by archaeologists in a cave in Palawan in 1962. Later, the so-called Tabon Man was revealed to be a woman based on recent studies of the skullcap that appears in many history textbooks. The famous skullcap, said to be 16,500 years old, is not related to the other remains excavated that pertain to three other individuals, with the oldest bone dated as 47,000 years old. Tabon was not a single-family dwelling, but was home to many people over time.

Araling Panlipunan has to keep pace with current archaeological discoveries like the “Callao Man” excavated in Cagayan in 2007, which goes back 67,000 years. In 2014, the remains of a prehistoric rhinoceros were found in Kalinga. While no human remains were found on the site, archaeologists found stone tools related to the marks found on the bones of the butchered rhinoceros, giving evidence of early human activity going back 700,000 years.

Students now learn about Homo luzonensis, previously unknown, whose finger and toe bones were curved, suggesting that they climbed a lot.

When I joined the Ateneo history department in 1998, one of the senior professors commented on my syllabus and asked, “Why do you cover the prehistoric Philippines?” Before I could answer, I was gently reminded to begin with the 1521 Magellan Expedition, the first circumnavigation of the world, and the “Discovery of the Philippines.” History, I was reminded, was based on written records, and prehistory was best left to the sociology-anthropology department’s survey course. Frankly, I couldn’t have covered the prehistory of the Philippines with a few meetings—not even a whole semester—because Philippine prehistory is way longer, centuries older than Philippine history.

Two mentors who changed my life were the historian Teodoro A. Agoncillo and the anthropologist E. Arsenio Manuel. First, Agoncillo drilled into me the words “No document, no history!” This was my inspiration when toiling in libraries or archives for primary sources, written sources for Philippine History. Then, Manuel came along. I sat in his graduate class on Philippine Prehistory in University of the Philippines Diliman and remember that he only wrote on the board once in the entire semester. On the first day of class, he wrote in large, legible letters, “Where history ends, anthropology begins.” Outside of the classroom, he took me aside and asked, “What will you do when the document trail turns cold?” I replied, I just have to be patient, and have faith that the documents I need will turn up someday. He smiled and told me again, “Where history ends, anthropology begins.” His advice was to look into other ways to trace or know the past. These could be in nonwritten documents like artifacts, photographs, food, lifeways, and the many little quirks that make us distinctly Filipino. Little wonder that someone once remarked on my work, saying that I should have been an anthropologist rather than a historian.

Well, I did try my hand at anthropology. Inspired by Manuel, I gave up history for a time and made a detour into archaeology. I woke up from my dream of being the Pinoy Indiana Jones when I learned archaeology required a lot of natural science subjects that I avoided in college: botany, zoology, biology, chemistry, and physics. Then there was the back-breaking physical work in the sun that made me return permanently to the quiet air-conditioned comfort of libraries, archives, and museums. All I have from my first and last excavation with a National Museum team in Batangas is a box of earthenware sherds and some leaf fossils. I don’t regret being a failed archeologist because it gave me habits of mind that inform my historical research and writing. Where history ends, anthropology begins.