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By Root 3228 0

in one area might prefer one landrace because of its texture when cooked; those in another might prefer a second because it is easier to prepare; those in a third might concentrate on landraces with higher yields, or ones that are less attractive to birds and rats. At each stage in the growing cycle village priests and landowners perform ceremonies, fueled by rice wine and often involving the sacrifice of chickens, pigs, or water buffalo, to seek the spiritual guidance of the area’s hundreds of local deities. Many of the farmers are Christians, but they perform the ceremonies anyway. All the while the terraces and the irrigation channels that feed them are meticulously maintained in a web of complex actions guided by ritual. It is a way of existence that has protected the genetic diversity of rice and maintained the soil despite centuries of intensive cultivation. This entire social, cultural, and ecological world would disappear with the terraces.

Today farmers have learned how to control the snails. Worms remain the more important problem. In 2008 two biologists discovered in the terraces nine worms new to science. They weren’t exotic—they were Filipino natives. They had always been living in the forest, probably in small numbers. But when the slopes around Ifugao were logged for mahogany, the environment changed around them, and they migrated to the paddies. The source of the problem thus wasn’t introduced species. It was the worldwide demand for Philippine mahogany.

The problem, in short, was my grandfather. People like him, activists say, are agents, however unwitting, of globalization. His innocent wish for a new table, multiplied ten-thousand-fold, set off an island version of the Amazon’s Great Heart of Palm Zap: chainsaw-wielding goons flooded Luzon’s mountains, wreaking ecological havoc in their frenzied effort to tear out every lauan tree in the hills. Left unchecked, greed would destroy this beautiful, age-old arrangement, as it had destroyed many others. Corporate capitalism sweeping across oceans and frontiers, wiping out traditional livelihoods with hardly a thought! Manuel was about sixty-five—he wasn’t sure of the exact figure—and thought he would live to see the end of the rice terraces. It was an object lesson in the evils of globalization.

Or was it? The first two anthropologists to study the Ifugao terraces arrived there before the First World War. Both were amazed at their apparent age. “It took a really long time to build those terraces,” marveled Henry Otley Beyer, the better-known member of the pair. A chemist who moved to the islands, married the teenage daughter of an Ifugao leader, and became known as the father of Philippines archaeology, Beyer firmly stated that Ifugao’s people “took between two and three thousand years to cover northern Luzon with the great terraced areas that exist there now.… [I]t was a thousand or 1,500 years ago when the terraced areas were at their maximum.”

Beyer’s estimate has long been accepted as gospel, repeated countless times in guidebooks like the one then in my bag. Unfortunately, he had no concrete evidence for this conclusion. He simply made a seat-of-the-pants guess about the time people without modern tools would need to build four hundred square miles of terraces. Not until 1962 did Felix Keesing, a Stanford anthropologist, try a different approach: he pored through Spanish records for mentions of the terraces. Although colonial “military commanders, mission fathers, and other visitors” crisscrossed Ifugao, not one mentioned the terraces until 1801. Because Keesing couldn’t believe that visitors wouldn’t marvel at this huge engineering feat, he reasoned that the terraces were a “comparatively recent innovation”—they were not a millennia-old tradition.

Neither Beyer nor Keesing had any archaeological evidence—they hadn’t so much as taken a shovel to the terraces. To be sure, terraces are difficult to date. Farmers constantly move around the soil, destroying the archaeological record. And modern archaeological tools like radiocarbon dating weren’t widely