Towards A Re-Interpreting of How We Understand Dynamic Regional Forager Resiliency

This dissertation applies ethnoarchaeological, archaeological, GIS, and historical methodologies, to a smaller, forager indigenous population located on Negros Island in the Central Philippines, known as the Ata, a term often interchangeable with “Negritos”, to analyze long and short- term forager histories, proposing a more sophisticated scenario of complex forms of forager decision-making and agency and contestation of the traditional reification of ‘forager’ and ‘farmer’ dichotomies (Junker and Smith, 2017; Morrison, 2002; Smith and Junker, 2014; Tuck-Po, 2013; Turner, 2013). The fundamental argument of this dissertation is that the reinterpretation of foragers must now be one of multi-facetedness where foragers are agents of change, resiliency, dynamicism, variance, while still maintaining unique cultural characteristics and identity. The cultural resiliency of foragers, in this case the ‘Negritos’ or Ata, must be understood as having always been enmeshed in multi-faceted matrices of networks highly influenced by time, place, the environment, political structures, social-cultural ideologies, group decision-making, and independent agency, at both the macro and microscopic levels. Resiliency must be redefined as economic, political, geographic, ecological, environmental, political and socio-cultural strategies that conjointly can resist change, adapt radically to new circumstances, slightly modify practices according to circumstances, adopt hybridized practices, and even volte-face, strategically returning to traditional practices, ultimately, redefining foragers and their histories as part of durable, long-standing, complex social matrices. This dissertation constitutes a voice for Ata yesterday and today in the Philippines, emphasizing indigenous forager cultural resilience and calling for an epistemological shift in re-interpreting forager histories.