Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The prehistory of the Philippines covers the events prior to the written history of what is now the Philippines.The current demarcation between this period and the early history of the Philippines is April 21, 900, which is the equivalent on the Proleptic Gregorian calendar for the date indicated on the Laguna Copperplate Inscription—the earliest known surviving written record to come from ...
The early polities of the Philippine archipelago were typically characterized by a three-tier social structure. Although different cultures had different terms to describe them, this three-tier structure invariably consisted of an apex nobility class, a class of "freemen", and a class of dependent debtor-bondsmen called " alipin " or "oripun."
Jewels, gold ingots, chains, bangles, calombigas and earrings were handed down from their ancestors and passed from generation to generation. The extensive use of gold during early Philippine history is well-documented, both in the archeological record and in the various written accounts from precolonial and early Spanish colonial times. [55]
Early Philippine society was composed of such diverse subgroups as e.g., fishermen, farmers and hunter/gatherers, with some living in mountainside swiddens, some on houseboats and some in commercially developed coastal ports. Some subgroups were economically self-sufficient, and others had symbiotic relationships with neighboring subgroups.
The most influential early figure in the archaeology of the Philippines was American anthropologist H. Otley Beyer. Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States in 1898, and the American colonial administration actively encouraged the anthropological study of the archipelago.
After the Philippines' independence from Spain in 1898 and the word Filipino "officially" became a nationality that includes the entire population of the Philippines regardless of racial ancestry, as per the Philippine nationality law and as described by Wenceslao Retana's Diccionario de filipinismos, where he defined Filipinos as follows, [69]
The pre-colonial Philippines uses the Abugida writing system that has been widely used in writing and seals on documents though it was for communication and no recorded writings of early literature or history [9] Ancient Filipinos usually write documents on bamboo, bark, and leaves which did not survive unlike inscriptions on clays, metals, and ...
A pre-colonial couple belonging to the datu or nobility as depicted in the Boxer Codex of the 16th century.. Datu is a title which denotes the rulers (variously described in historical accounts as chiefs, sovereign princes, and monarchs) of numerous Indigenous peoples throughout the Philippine archipelago. [1]