26 Anthropology NewsletterlOctober 1989

By the year 2000, one in three Amer- icans will be a member of a minority group. But today fewer minority men and women are attending college. For example, in 1976 34% of black high school graduates went on to college, but in 1985 only 26% went on.

One solution, university officials think, is to increase minority faculty on campus.

Yet as is true in many academic dis- ciplines, minority presence on most an- thropology faculties is weak. Today, 93% of our faculty are white (AAA 1989 Survey of Departments), and 88% of an- thropology graduate students are white (AAA 1988 Survey of Anthropology PhDs).

The small number of minority faculty, and of future minority faculty in our dis- cipline, is womsome. Anglos (non-His- panic whites)-the students our disci- pline traditionally caters to-already are minorities in New Mexico, Mississippi and Hawaii, and soon will be minorities

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newly defined problems. -Joseph

differences between Tasaday and Blit Manobo,” says linguist Clay Johnston of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Dallas, “but it’s still unclear whether Tasaday is a separate language.”

Johnston, who has spent 10 years studying the Blit Manobo language, lis- tened to one of Molony’s tapes and in January played it for several linguists in the Philippines. Much of what they heard was understood as Blit Manobo, Johnston says, but several differences turned up in vocabulary and grammatical markers (such as prepositions and words indicating tense or plurality).

“The big question is: What do lan- guage differences prove?” Johnston says. “This is controversial among lin- guists, and because of the Tasaday de- bate, there’s pressure to make more from their language data than can reasonably be done.” ‘

Another important question, notes an- thropologist Thomas N Headland, also of the Summer Institute, involves what the Tasaday ate. Based on his own field- work with the Agta, a hunter-gatherer group on the Philippine island of Luzon, and reports from other investigators, Headland concludes that a rain forest would not contain enough wild starch foods, such as yams, to sustain human life. The Tasaday live at 4000 feet above sea level, an elevation where these foods are especially scarce, he adds.

The Tasaday, like the Agta, probably traded forest products for starch foods cultivated by nearby farmers, Headland says. The Tasaday live only a three-hour walk from the Blit Manobo farmers, so periodic trading seems plausible.

Headland does not question Molony’s linguistic findings, but calls her conten- tion the Tasaday have remained isolated for hundreds of years premature.

Ethnobotanist Douglas E Yen of Aus- tralia National University in Canberra, who in 1972 spent 38 days with the Tas-

aday studying their diet, says Head- land’s “wild yam hypothesis” is off the mark; the forest provided them with enough food of sufficient variety to sub- sist qn. Their daily menu consisted of numerous foods, including roots, nuts, yams, wild bananas, ferns, figs, ginger fruit, crabs and tadpoles. Some Tasaday went on hunting and gathering expedi- tions for a week or more, Yen says. They returned with small portions of meat, probably consuming larger quantities at kill sites or during the trip, as observers have seen hunter-gatherers do else- where.

Even if some Tasaday visited nearby farms as Headland suggests, Yen says they had nothing of value to the farmers to trade.

He notes, however, that by December 1972 the Tasaday were receiving gov- ernment rice supplements, another indi- cation of the rapid changes in their lives. “We may have seen the last of the orig- inal Tasaday in 1972,” he says.

Yen suspects the Tasaday were farm- ers sometime in their ancestry and fled to the mountainsto escape one of the many political upheavals in the Philippines during the last few centuries.

If Yen’s suspicion is coqect, the Tas- aday would have developed farmore so- phisticated stone tools than those ob- served in the early 1970s, counters ar- cheologist Robert L Carneiro of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. At Judith Moses’s re- quest, Carneiro, an authority on South American stone tools, studied photo- graphs of Tasaday stone axes last fall.

“They are coarse, crude, amateurish jobs, unlike other stone tools from the same’ region of the Philippines,” Car- neiro says. “The, evidence points more to their being a hoax.” Particularly tell- ing, he says, is the loose rattan hafting poorly designed for wielding a stone tool.

In a letter to Carneiro dated December 27, 1988, journalist John Nance, who took the photographs of the stone axes,

calls the archeologist’s conclusion “in- appropriately judgmental. ” The Tasa- day usually use the loose hafts to hook the axes onto pieces of clothing for easy carrying, Nance says.

He also notes that The Gentle Tusuduy describes two sets of stone tools: cruder implements made at a stream to demon- strate tool-making techniques to visitors, and ancestral heirlooms made from a harder stone and periodically rehafted with finer rattan lacings.

In the early 1970s, Robert Fox, a now- deceased archeologist who lived in the Philippines, studied the stone tools and concluded they were used for simple types of scraping or sawing, such as breaking open nuts or extracting the edi- ble pith from slender palms.

Anthropologist Gerald Berreman of the University of California-Berkeley, a critic of Tasaday research, sides with Carneiro’s analysis. “These tools are clearly fakes,” he asserts.

In addition, Berreman says, observers at the Tasaday caves have found no floor middens-the anthropological term for the inevitable mounds of garbage at hu- man occupation sites. While he argues that this suggests the tribe has been fab- ricated, researchers who visited the site, such as Molony, maintain that furthsr fieldwork would undoubtedly locate middens.

Berreman views the Tasaday as rain- forest clock punchers, reporting for work as primitive hunter-gatherers in the morning and sneaking back to their home villages at night after journalists and researchers had left by helicopter.

Both critics and defenders of the Tas- aday wonder how the tribe survived, given its population of only 26 individ- uals in 1972.

“It would be impossible for a group of that size to sustain its population, unless i t were able to obtain spouses from neighboring tribes,” Headland says. De- mographers generally concur that a group requires at least 400 members to continue reproducing new generations as

large as the old one, he notes. All the scientists who originally vis-

ited the Tasaday agree the tribe would have disappeared without some kind of contact with outsiders. Molony says. Perhaps an illness, introduced through brief encounters with people from other tribes, devastated the original popula- tion. In 1972, Molony points out, the Tasaday spoke of a plague that killed many of their people a few generations back.

In addition, Nance says, the Tasaday initially spoke of two neighboring bands of rain-forest people with whom they in- termarried-the Tasafeng and the San- duka. Investigators have located neither band.

Questions about the tribe’s size, tools and middens do not alter Nance’s opin- ion that “there is no good evidence that the Tasaday are not real. ”

Nance says he has visited the Tasaday five times in the last few years and knows of several expeditions to the mountain caves turned back by gunmen in the area. The Philippines’ political sit- uation remains volatile, Nance notes, with Marxist guerrillas, disaffected sol- diers from the Marcos regime and armed tribal groups all operating out of the Mindanao rain forest.

“I don’t see how scientific work can go on in that atmosphere,” he says.

Nance maintains that political pres- sures fuel the hoax charges. If the Phil- ippine government comes to regard the Tasaday as imposters, the tribe ,will be stripped of its land preserve, opening the rain forest up to logging companies and other groups desperate for land amid a burgeoning population crunch on the is- lands.

For now, the land is off limits to log- gers, and the “gentleTasaday” continue to fuel a rancorous scientific debate. “The session at the anthropological meeting this November should bring to- gether the major insights on the Tasa- ‘ day,’: remarks Johnston. “But I doubt it. will resolve the issue.”

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Minority Presence in Anthropology’s Future

public school students are non-Anglos, and that percentage is projected to grow in the 21st century.

According to the American Council on Education, eight in ten US colleges have started programs to bolster under- graduate minority student enrollment, retention and graduation. Will anthro- pology in the 1990s be able to “capture” degree candidates from the future’s in- creasingly larger pool of nonwhite stu- dents? Or will tomorrow’s majority stu- dents find our discipline too white to handle?

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1987: A new field of biomedical an- thropology is developing. Many bio- logical anthropologists at this time fo- cus on the evaluation of health, lon- gevity and causes of death among ar- cheo log ica l p o p u l a t i o n s . High technology allows the use of scan- ning microscopes and even new in- struments to investigate the shape of enamel prisms in teeth, elements of dietarv intake. and a whole series of

Archeologists Look to the Future

What will archeology look like in the year 2000? The following predictions come from Archaeology Magazine’s special issue on the 21st century (Janu- arylFebruary 1989):

-Archeologists in the 21st century will be disappointed that we did not do more to forestall the destruction of sites in the 20th century. -Brian Fagan (Califor- nia-Santa Barbara)

In 60 years archeology will foster tourism and help support nations with revenue from ancient monuments that preserve our collective human heritage. -Brian Fagan (California-Santa Bar- bara)

Hominid evolution will be absorbed within comparative evolutionary biol- ogy, and we may face the end of pa- leoanthropology as a discipline. -Rob- ert A Foley (Cambridge)

In the year 2050, multidimensional data banks and holographic inventories will make visiting collections “an easy ejectronic matter.” -Margaret Conkey (California-Berkeley)

In the next hundred years, standard

reference to tree-ring sequences of the last 10,000 years will be available for many areas of Earth. Thermoluminesc- enck will be used to date heat-altered stone tools. Computers will be as impor- tant as trowels. Much of the world’s rock art will have been dated. -Michael A . Jochim (California-Santa Barbara)

Archeologists will electronically scan sites in 3-D to decide what part, if any, shpuld be excavated. -George Bass (Texas A&M)

Future archeologists excavating 20th-century sites will be confronted with an unprecedented quantity of trash. New sampling and analytical techniques will be needed to cope with refuse in bulk. -Kathleen Deagan (Florida)

Fifty years from now archeologists will specialize in small artifqcts, from two millimeters to ionic in size. -Rob- ert C Dunnell (Washington) I

With improved technologies, arche- ologists of 2050 will have access to un- derwater, mountain, desert and jungle sites inaccessible today. Salvage ar- cheology will grow. Many discoveries in fifty years will take place entirely in mu- seums. -Ellen Herscher (American As- sociation of Museums)