Craft Goods Specialization and Prestige Goods Exchange in Philippine Chiefdoms of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Abstract

Archaeological evidence is used to examine changes in the organization of earthenware pottery production in lowland Philippine chiefdoms between the late first millennium A.D. and the time of European contact, and specifically how these internal production systems are related to chiefly strategies for enhanced participation in a growing foreign prestige goods trade. Ethnohistoric data are used to show that chiefly control of upland-lowland exchange systems involving ceramics and other lowlandmanufactured goods became essential to obtaining interior resources for export to foreign traders. Key issues are the organization of lowland pottery production and the role of the lowland chiefly elite in facilitating specialist production. These aspects of Philippine chiefly economies are examined using regional archaeological data from one such coastal chiefdom centered in the Bais Region of N egros Oriental from A.D. 500 to the time of Spanish contact. Technological and morphological analyses of earthenware from Bais Region sites of the sixth-tenth centuries and fifteenth - sixteenth centuries A.D. indicate increasing standardization in lowland-manufactured pottery over time. This is interpreted in terms of a transition from part-time household production to full-time specialization concentrated at the coastal chiefly center of Tanjay and geared toward high volume production for expanded lowlandupland trade. KEYWORDS: Philippines, chiefdoms, specialization, trade, pottery.