|
Philippines EARLY HISTORY
Negrito, proto-Malay, and Malay peoples were the principal
peoples of the Philippine archipelago. The Negritos are believed
to have migrated by land bridges some 30,000 years ago, during
the last glacial period. Later migrations were by water and took
place over several thousand years in repeated movements before
and after the start of the Christian era.
The social and political organization of the population in
the widely scattered islands evolved into a generally common
pattern. Only the permanent-field rice farmers of northern Luzon
had any concept of territoriality. The basic unit of settlement
was the
barangay (see Glossary),
originally a kinship
group headed by a datu (chief). Within the
barangay, the broad social divisions consisted of nobles,
including the datu; freemen; and a group described before
the Spanish period as dependents. Dependents included several
categories with differing status: landless agricultural workers;
those who had lost freeman status because of indebtedness or
punishment for crime; and slaves, most of whom appear to have
been war captives.
Islam was brought to the Philippines by traders and
proselytizers from the Indonesian islands. By 1500 Islam was
established in the Sulu Archipelago and spread from there to
Mindanao; it had reached the Manila area by 1565. Muslim
immigrants introduced a political concept of territorial states
ruled by rajas or sultans who exercised suzerainty over the
datu. Neither the political state concept of the Muslim
rulers nor the limited territorial concept of the sedentary rice
farmers of Luzon, however, spread beyond the areas where they
originated. When the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century,
the majority of the estimated 500,000 people in the islands still
lived in barangay settlements.
Data as of June 1991
|
