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houses with Philippine occupants wearing traditional costumes.

In August 1905, at the age of twenty-two, Beyer arrived in Manila. This was the start of over five decades of productive work on Philippine culture and society. The head of the United States Bureau of Education, David P. Barrows, who held a Ph.D. in anthropology, employed Beyer to work as a schoolteacher among the Ifugao in the mountains of northern Luzon. The young teacher became so absorbed in the people and lifestyle of the province that he married the daughter of an Ifugao chief.

In 1914 Beyer was appointed to the professorial chair of anthropology and ethnology at the University of the Philippines. He continued to occupy that position until his retirement and was the founder and first chairman of the school’s Department of Anthropology.

His first writings on the Philippines date to 1921. He was prolific as an ethnographer, producing a 150-volume work entitled The Philippine Ethnographic Series, a collation of his research that later included data from the central and southern Philippines and covered 150 ethnolinguistic groups in all.

Early in 1926 Beyer took part in his first archaeological fieldwork in the Philippines, the result of an accidental discovery of major prehistoric sites at Novaliches during the construction of a dam for Manila’s water supply. His ensuing investigation was the beginning of an important archaeological survey, which, after five years of work, resulted in the identification of 120 sites and a collection of almost half a million artifacts. Beyer turned down an offer to join the Anthropology Department at Harvard University because of the importance of the Novaliches sites to Philippine prehistory.

During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, from 1941 to 1945, Beyer was placed under conditional internment, but the Japanese allowed him to continue writing. He was able to complete two important publications, Outline Review of Philippine Archaeology by Islands and Provinces and Philippine and East Asian Archaeology, and Its Relation to the Origin of the Pacific Islands Population (Beyer 1947, 1948). These major works are invaluable references and are still used by contemporary archaeologists working in the Philippines.

Archaeological research in the Philippines until the 1950s was almost completely monopolized by Beyer. A private person who worked alone, he was extremely independent. He avoided publicity and was not well known outside Southeast Asia until after his two postwar publications appeared. With countless informants all over the country, he was able to organize the archipelago’s archaeological finds and sites and artifacts, and he proposed a localized cultural chronology (Old Stone Age, New Stone Age, Iron Age, Porcelain Age, and so forth). As the only professional researcher interested in the archipelago’s prehistory, he accumulated numerous artifacts.

Many anthropologists working in Southeast Asia were his close friends, including Austrian scholar Robert Heine-Geldern and P.V. Stein Callenfels. As a group, they were all drawn into the regional history of Southeast Asia, and this common interest initiated the Far Eastern Prehistory Congresses held in Hanoi in 1932, Manila in 1935, and Singapore in 1938, which proved useful for comparing data and material from across Asia.

Numerous honors were accorded him by various institutions for his untiring efforts and interest in Philippine prehistory and culture. These include special awards from two Philippine presidents and honorary doctorate degrees from three Philippine universities—Silliman in 1959, the Ateneo de Manila in 1961, and the University of the Philippines in 1964. He was also honored by a scholarly symposium in 1965 on his eighty-second birthday.

Henry Otley Beyer died one year later, on December 31, 1966. He was buried, as he requested, in an Ifugao death house in Banaue, Ifugao, in the mountains of northern Luzon.

Wilfredo P. Ronquillo