via UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 22 October 2021: A feature on Philippine archaeologist Stephen Acabado, who is also the new director for the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
“They were not happy when I shared the findings of my investigations,” said Stephen Acabado of local residents’ reaction to his research in the mountainous Ifugao province of the Philippines.
An anthropological archaeologist, Acabado is the new director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, an associate professor of anthropology and member of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. He has spent almost a decade conducting research in the highlands of Ifugao, beginning with a major project that sought to date the region’s historic rice terraces.
Whereas most people in the region believed the terraces were at least 2,000 years old, Acabado’s research revealed that they had been created roughly 300–400 years ago by lowlanders who fled up to the mountains to escape Spanish colonization.
These findings directly contradicted dominant narratives about the Ifugao, reinforced by the Philippine education curricula: that they were isolated from the colonized world and thus represent the pejorative term, “original Filipinos.”
Source: An archaeologist committed to community education and outreach
