| Abstract: |
The research reported here focuses on the Ata foragers of Negros Island in the central Philippines. Despite being subjected to long-term changes in ecological and social landscapes, the Ata have maintained a high level of flexibility in their economic and social strategies. Ethnographic interviews and participant observation among the Ata, along with ethnoarchaeological work at a number of Ata sites, have revealed how they have managed to incorporate external influences, mingling traditional knowledge and new knowledge in deeply-held cultural expressions, while retaining significant agency in these external interactions. This paper explores how the Ata have melded external beliefs and practices with their own, undergoing both cultural resiliency and cultural change over time that is most archaeologically visible in settlement organization, subsistence technologies and social identity markers, and less materially seen in governance, language and the arts. This specific case illustrates that foragers in Southeast Asia do not need to be marginal ‘people without history’ when researchers integrate ethnographic, archaeological and historical analysis.
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