The following is displayed here courtesy of "The H. Otley Beyer Foundation Museum".

The Philippine Rice Terraces

By: Dr. H. Otley Beyer

 The Philippine rice terraces have been referred to as one of the wonders of the ancient world. To the anthropologist they represent something in the nature of megalithic structures. The old-style Ifugao rice terrace properly built consisted first of digging out a terrace from the hillside and then building up on edge of that terrace a stone wall. The back of that wall is filled in with layers of materials carried up frequently from the river beds or brought down from the hillsides, which required a great deal of labor to get into place.

 First they level the area behind that wall so as to form a foundation. Over that they put gravel and sand, then over that some clay that they can find. This is to make the terrace waterproof. Then inside this lining they put a foot or so of sand again and then some gravel, which are brought down from the hillside, usually not by merely carrying some baskets or wooden troughs but by running them down with the aid of water.

 Our mountain folk are very skillful users of water. They have learned to turn water into a carrying agency. The waterfall and the irrigation ditches are quite marvelous in construction. The water is taken out of a very rugged stream and curves around a hillside and is often in a very narrow ditch that is dug out of solid rock. When I first started studying the origin of our rice terraces I had several ideas about them, some of which later proved to be quite wrong.

 I took a long trip once across northern Luzon- starting out from Baguio and going eastward to Ifugao through very rugged terrain, and then on eastward to the Cagayan River. We turned around an end of the mountain chain there and came back again on the north side of the west coast again at Tagudin. It was that trip to the terraces on each side of the great east-west mountains range that gave me a true insight into the origin of the rice terraces in that area. These people have often been thought of as the original terrace building people and as coming in from the Cagayan River region.

 The Mountain Province lies between the Cagayan River and the west coast of Luzon. Most of the rivers in the Ifugao country, where the largest terrace areas are, run into the Cagayan River. In the past we thought that the original people must have come up the Cagayan River from the coast and then spread up the various branches of the smaller rivers that run from the terrace country into the Cagayan River. But on this trip I came to the conclusion that the terrace people had not originated in that way at all but had in fact came in just the opposite direction. That is, they originated on the western side of Luzon and spread eastward.

 Later on, through certain continued researches I was able to confirm this view, and in the last 20 years or so to almost proved the truth of the theory.

 The real origin of the terraces, to my mind came through the spreading out of terrace- building people - a people who already knew how to build rice terraces- down the west side of Luzon to the Gulf of Lingayen, then up the Agno River is a very rugged stream that comes through a deep canyon or gorge from the mountains- as a matter of fact the Ambuklao Power Plant has been built in that area to harness the river’s strength for commercial and other purposes. And that is why we have never thought of the people coming up that way, because it is such a rugged canyon, and most people thought that there would be no settlers that would migrate up such a gorge-enclosed river.

 Actually, however, between the mouth of the gorge and the bend of Agno River west in Pangasinan Province there is another river from the east northeast that flows into the Agno and which we know as the Kayapa River. And when I studied those rice terraces I knew right away from previous experience that they were very old ones.

 When people in the mountains build rice terraces they do not build them out of river stones, in the rugged terraced areas in the hills and mountains. They build them out of broken stones. They break up the stones and build those terraces out of broken stones. But later on nature dissolves these broken stones and one by one they are eroded away. As they decay and fall out, one by one, the people who own these terraces carry up round hard stones from the river, which may be far down the mountain side. And after filing the first hole they may see another hole. They then bring up another round stone and fill it again. And they do this month after month, year after year and generation after generation, until finally that wall is made of round stones until there is not a single broken stone in it.

 As I went on that trip, I related above, eastward first, across Benguet and Ifugao and then back again on the north side of the Polis mountain range across Bontoc and Lepanto and then to the coast, I realized for the first time that I was following a path that the builders of those terraces must have been those that we found in the Kayapa River Valley and across the inside of the Southeast part of the Polis mountain range, where the rivers originate, then down into the Magat River and finally into the Cagayan River.

Now, the people who followed that route along the Kayapa River must have crossed over through the low southeast side of the Polis range and built their terraces not on the lower river courses but on the upper reaches near the very top. The oldest terraces are those way up these river valleys, on the highest mountain sides.

Then the terraces run down the Chico River through northern Bontoc into Kalinga sub province, and finally down the Chico toward the Cagayan mainstream. And basically the terraces on the lower Chico are younger than those of the upper Chico. So I have a very strong belief now that the people who built the rice terraces - or at least those who stimulated and taught the builders- were mainly one people.

The actual laborers who built those terraces, I suspect were not the people whose minds conceived them. Neither were they the ones who brought the knowledge into the area. The number of people who had the knowledge of terrace building were probably very few. They brought other things with them besides the building of rice terraces. And they spread their culture over a wide area. The people who actually built the terraces under the direction of these in-comers were already in the country long before the terrace builders came. They merely learned how to do this terrace building from a relatively small group of people who brought the knowledge of rice terrace building into the country and spread it into the regions which I have indicated.

 When did all this happen? It is not safe for any scientist, though, or for any anthropologist who thinks of himself as at least partly a scientist, to be free in making speculations about dates and chronology. However, there are two positive factors that lead us to believe that the terraces we have today in the mountain country began to be built in what we call the Copper-Bronze Age, when knowledge of iron did not yet exist.

 Copper was first used, I think, in the island of Luzon. Our earliest people in the Luzon area who seem to be the ones who did the earliest terrace-building, definitely had a knowledge of copper. They knew how to mine it, smelt it, and work it and make tools, utensils and ornaments. We say Copper-Bronze because of the existence of some bronze tools and objects in the country. But I do not think that bronze was ever made in the Philippines. We do not have any tin here. Bronze as we know, is an alloy of copper and tin.

But copper smelting and copper working were known to the terrace-building people and perhaps the bronze objects that we occasionally find in the island of Luzon were brought here from other lands, either from other islands or from the mainland of Asia. But the copper objects and tools and vessels were made here, like the copper found smelted and worked in the mountains of northern Luzon. The people were still working copper mines when I first visited that region, and I might say that there were a good many of them working at it.

 Now, in studying the spread of that copper-using culture, we find the best evidence of the people who built the terraces- wherever we find the oldest terraces and the earliest evidence of the terrace building, we are likely to find in archeological sites the oldest use of copper. And there is no certainty in my mind that the people who built the terraces, in any way preceded the copper culture. So I began to believe that it was the people with the knowledge of copper-using who came in and built the first terraces, and taught our local people how to build the rest.

 The terraces were not built in a day, as we know. They were built over many hundreds of years. It took between two and three thousand years to cover Luzon with the great terraced areas that exist there now.

 Most people do not know that there are other areas in Luzon besides the Mountain Province which have vast areas of stone-walled rice terraces. Before the Spanish period in the Philippines there was such an area around Laguna de bay, with hundreds of square miles of rice terraces just as spectacular as those in the Mountain province. Around the lake in northern Rizal, and into the hills behind Binangonan and behind Tanay, one may still find remains of what is left today of several hundred square miles of  good rice terraces. Today, many of these are covered with jungle and big tees, and all you can see are the bases of the old terraces.

 I do not believe that there was more than one terrace culture that came into the islands. The method of cultivation was the same everywhere. The method of building the ditches was the same. All the little details of their culture was very muck alike and one can see those same things in this old terrace area around Laguna de bay as is seen today in active use in Ifugao and other parts of the Mountain province. I think it was the same people who built the terraces in both areas. But these people disappeared in the lowlands- or changed their culture at least and became mixed with the other lowland peoples and became absorbed into the lowland culture of today- within the last 300 to 400 years or so.

 Now the reason perhaps we find these terraces around Laguna de Bay is that some of the people did not go into the mountains in the north but turned south along the foothills and came back around the east side of Laguna de Bay. And we find that this kind of terrace runs clear down to Lukban and even beyond.

Not much has been said about the terrace-building in-comers came from outside the Philippines. Although it is a rather difficult subject which is still being investigated, a few things may be cited.

I have traveled extensively outside the Philippines in the terraced areas in south China and northern Indo-China, around the inland Sea of Japan in the north and in Java, Bali and other areas of Malaysia. In all of these areas there are to be found exactly the same type of terraces. The process of building the walls, the way the irrigation ditches are built are almost identical from around the inland Java, as well as in south China and parts of northern Indo-China.

 I have a very strong feeling that these terrace areas all belong to a single common culture spread over a vast area during the past several thousand years. And everywhere there is more or less evidence of an accompanying copper-bronze culture going with it. I am not putting this forward as a definite statement, but only a theory which still has to be verified and studied. But it may be said that our evidence to date indicates the area of south China and northern Indo-China as the motherland of the terrace building.