| Abstract: |
This research involves the use of ethnohistoric and archaeological data to investigate the evolution of sociopolitical complexity in Philippine lowland societies of the late first millennium to mid-second millennium A.D., specifically how these social transformations are related to the development of long-distance trade interactions with Asian mainland states. In contrast to the traditional view, which sees the emergence of political hierarchies and social stratification as appearing very late and primarily in context of this foreign trade, the present study attempts to demonstrate that this trend towards complexity had indigenous roots extending back several millennia and that the initiation of intensive foreign trade contacts is best viewed in the context of expanding local chiefly political economies revolving around 'prestige good' exchange. In the first half of the dissertation, ethnohistoric data (utilizing 10th-17th century Spanish and Chinese records, combined with more recent ethnographic accounts of indigenous Philippine complex societies) is used to develop a picture of socio-political organization and production and exchange systems in contact period Philippine chiefdoms that can serve as a chronologically-fixed baseline for archaeologically-based analyses of the role of trade in emergence of these coastal complex societies. The second half of the research is devoted to archaeological investigations of one such coastal chiefdom which developed in the 315 km2 Bais Region of Negros Oriental in the Central Philippines between A.D. 500-1600. Regional settlement pattern analyses, and the archaeological documentation of luxury good distribution in the region, are used to demonstrate the presence of regionally centralized political systems and political economies fueled by 'prestige good' production and exchange well prior to the early second millennium advent of mainland Asian trade.
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