CORDILLERA RICE TERRACES OF NORTHERN LUZON: HISTORY, CONSTRUCTION, ARCHAEOLOGY

RICE TERRACES OF THE PHILIPPINE CORDILLERAS

Maligcong Rice Terraces

The Ifugao and Bontoc people of north-central Luzon grow rice on ingeniously constructed systems of terraces that are cut into the precipitous mountain sides to create flat, irrigated fields. They are engineering marvels, climbing 300 meters (1,000 feet) up steep slopes and held up by walls of earth and stone sometimes as high as 15 meters (50 feet). A grouping of adjacent fields forms a himpuntona'an, a traditional agricultural district that is named and includes a ritual plot that is the first to be planted and harvested. Several himpuntona'an share a single water-catchment area and cooperate in regulating irrigation and land use. One district may have as many as 25 in a 104-square-kilometer (40-square-mile) area. [Source: A. Abalahin, “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life,” Cengage Learning, 2009

The terraces are designed to funnel water from the misty rainforest–covered mountains above to rice being cultivated in the paddies. The Ifugao created the paddies by hand by building a series of retaining walls with stones and mud. Each terrace is designed to draw water from the irrigation channels, while also retaining the water. During the planting season seedlings are placed in the water-filled fields. After the rice is harvested the pools are drained and most of the maintenance is done on the terrace walls. To do this, mud and hard, round stones are brought up the slopes from the river below to reinforce the terrace walls. [Source: Mike Dilger and Rico Hizon, BBC, April 14, 2018]

According to UNESCO: These terraces testify to the persistence of cultural traditions and to extraordinary continuity and resilience, as archaeological evidence indicates that this technology has been practiced in the region for centuries with little change. They offer valuable lessons for similar environments elsewhere. Their upkeep depends on collective community cooperation grounded in detailed knowledge of the rich biological diversity of the Ifugao agro-ecosystem, a finely calibrated annual cycle guided by lunar phases, zoning and land-use planning, extensive soil conservation, and sophisticated pest control based on herbal processing, all accompanied by religious rituals.

As a living cultural landscape, the terraces continue to evolve, with gradual adjustments that refine cultural responses to changing climatic, social, political, and economic conditions. Nevertheless, the continued occupation, use, and maintenance of ancestral lands by the Ifugao in time-honored ways ensure ongoing recognition and appreciation of the lasting value of these traditions. These practices not only preserve the terraces but also continue to sustain the community that created them.

Philippines Cordilleras Rice Terraces — a UNESCO World Heritage Site

location of the UNESCO-recognized rice terraces

The rice terraces of the Philippines Cordilleras were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995. According to UNESCO: They “are living cultural landscapes devoted to the production of one of the world's most important staple crops, rice. They preserve traditional techniques and forms dating back many centuries, still viable today. At the same time they illustrate a remarkable degree of harmony between humankind and the natural environment of great aesthetic appeal, as well as demonstrating sustainable farming systems in mountainous terrain, based on a careful use of natural resources. [Source: UNESCO]

The rice terraces of the Philippines Cordilleras: 1) “are a dramatic testimony to a community's sustainable and primarily communal system of rice production, based on harvesting water from the forest clad mountain tops and creating stone terraces and ponds, a system that has survived for two millennia. 2) The rice terraces are a memorial to the history and labour of more than a thousand generations of small-scale farmers who, working together as a community, have created a landscape based on a delicate and sustainable use of natural resources. 3) The rice terraces are an outstanding example of land-use that resulted from a harmonious interaction between people and its environment which has produced a steep terraced landscape of great aesthetic beauty, now vulnerable to social and economic changes.

“The rice terraces are emblematic of Philippine heritage; they exemplify human ingenuity and humanity’s ability to modify even the most marginal landscape,” University of California, Los Angeles, anthropological archaeologist Stephen Acabado told Archaeology magazine. Acabado was born in the Philippines and has researched the region for years. This intricate agroecological system, he says, highlights the consonance between human needs and sustainable ecological management. [Source: Karen Coates, Archaeology magazine, May-June 2018]

History of the Cordilleras Rice Terraces

It is often said the rice terraces of the Cordilleras are over 2,000 years old. According to UNESCO, they are the only monuments in the Philippines that show no sign of influence from colonial cultures. Because of the region’s rugged terrain, the Cordillera peoples are among the few groups in the country who successfully resisted foreign domination and preserved their indigenous cultural traditions. The story of the terraces is closely bound to the history of their people, their culture, and their customary practices. [Source: UNESCO]

Ifugao land use system; The rice paddies receive water-carried nutrients from ecosystems located above (black arrows); Woodlots are located around the rice terraces and hamlet, whereas public forests are located further away on the surrounding mountains; Swidden fields are cultivated on slopes too steep to make terraces; Harvested products are transferred to the hamlet (white arrows); The terrace shape of the rice paddies allows for the optimal use of nutrients and minimal erosion despite the steep slope Researchgate

The terraces, which extend across five present-day provinces, constitute the only examples of stone construction from the pre-colonial period. The Philippines is unique among Southeast Asian cultures in being entirely wood-based: unlike Cambodia, Indonesia, or Thailand, for instance, both domestic dwellings and ritual structures such as temples and shrines were traditionally built of wood, a practice that continues in the terrace settlements.

Terracing in the Cordilleras is thought to have begun around two thousand years ago, although scholars disagree about the original purpose for which it was developed. The terraces demonstrate a sophisticated level of structural and hydraulic engineering knowledge among their builders. The skills and methods required to maintain them, reinforced through ritual practice, have been transmitted orally from generation to generation, without written documentation. Taro was the first crop cultivated when the terraces were initially used for agriculture, later giving way to rice, which remains the dominant crop today.

Construction of the Cordilleras Rice Terraces

According to UNESCO, the terraces lie at elevations ranging from 700 to 1,500 meters above sea level. Four clusters contain the most intact examples, each composed of core elements that include a surrounding ring of privately managed forests (muyong), the terraces themselves, villages, and sacred groves. While terraced rice fields are widespread across Asia, even gently undulating landscapes require stone or earthen walls to retain water for wet-rice cultivation. At higher elevations, paddies must remain constantly flooded and therefore depend on carefully engineered systems for collecting and channeling water. What distinguishes the Philippine terraces from others in Asia is their greater height above sea level and their exceptionally steep slopes. High-altitude farming relies on a special rice variety that can sprout under near-freezing conditions, grows to chest height, and has non-shattering panicles, making harvesting possible on slopes too steep for animals or machinery. [Source: UNESCO]

Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras (Philippines), from the UNESCO site

The construction of the terraces demands meticulous skill and precision. Drainage is ensured by underground conduits embedded within the terrace fill. The terraces cloak the mountainsides, closely following natural contours. Above them, extending toward the mountain peaks, lies the ring of privately owned forest (muyong), intensively managed according to traditional ecological principles that recognize the interdependence of the entire system and guarantee a steady water supply to keep the terraces inundated. Water distribution is regulated so that it is shared fairly, with no terrace blocking the flow to those below. A sophisticated network of dams, sluices, channels, and bamboo pipes—maintained collectively by the community—directs water downward until it drains into a stream at the valley floor.

Villages or hamlets are linked to particular terrace groups and consist of clusters of single-family dwellings that reflect the people’s spatial understanding of their mountainous surroundings. Each house is a one-room wooden structure topped by a steeply sloping thatched pyramidal roof, raised on four posts and accessed by a ladder that is drawn up at night. Related families form compact hamlets organized around a centrally located ritual rice field. This field is always the first to be planted and harvested; its owner makes agricultural decisions for the entire community and oversees key ritual property, including a granary that houses carved wooden deities and a basket reliquary containing portions of consecrated offerings from agricultural ceremonies. Nearby stands a ritual hill, typically marked by a grove of sacred betel trees surrounding a hut or open shelter where ritual specialists reside and conduct traditional rites.

Are the Philippines Rice Terraces Really 2,000 Years Old?

According to Philippine history books and other sources, the rice terraces were built 2,000 years ago by the ancestors of today’s Ifugao people. But is this really true? Acabado told Archaeology magazine, the date is not based on any scientific evidence. Rather, it stems from the work of early 20th-century anthropologists Roy Franklin Barton and Henry Otley Beyer, who calculated the terraces’ age based on the length of time they guessed it would have taken people to build them. [Source:Karen Coates, Archaeology magazine, May-June 2018]

Karen Coates wrote in Archaeology magazine: Acabado’s archaeological investigations show that the adoption of wet-rice agriculture, accomplished by planting seedlings in flooded fields, is much, much younger in Ifugao than previously thought — 1,600 years younger, in fact. While some terraces likely existed in Ifugao centuries before that, Acabado says, evidence suggests they were used for growing taro, not rice, and that those terraces were small. Imagine the difference between a backyard garden and the expansive farm fields that define much of the American Midwest. That’s the kind of difference Acabado believes existed between the earliest Ifugao terraces and what we see today. According to him, the spectacular landscape that garnered Ifugao World Heritage status dates to an era that coincides with the arrival of Spanish colonizers. For Acabado, that changes everything.

The dominant historical narrative told throughout the Philippines is a story of small, remote minority populations that moved higher and higher into the mountains over millennia as waves of new people arrived and settled in the lowlands. It is accepted that Spanish colonizers were unable to conquer the Ifugao because the terrain they occupied was so rugged. This paints the highlanders as essentially outside the March of history, as bystanders, while colonization and modernization swept through other corners of the Philippines. This account is what Acabado recalls learning in school. By the time he reached college, he realized it was based on colonial notions of indigenous people. “I started to think about how to decolonize our history,” he says.

Acabado knew it was important to date the terraces archaeologically. When the evidence connected the timing of the origins of Ifugao wet-rice cultivation with the arrival of the Spanish, he envisioned an entirely different narrative, one of determined people who took refuge in the mountains when faced with the prospect of colonization. “They were not mere spectators on the sidelines of history,” says Acabado. Rather than retreating, they reshaped their culture through the development of an intricate agricultural system that depended on organization, social unity, and ritual feasts. “Wet-rice agriculture was an expression of imperial resistance,” Acabado says. “It also facilitated political integration.”

Archaeological Work at the Cordilleras Rice Terraces

With the goal of systematically documenting local history, Acabado joined archaeologists from the Philippines, Hawai‘i, Guam, and other regions to establish the Ifugao Archaeological Project (IAP) in 2012. The project supports an archaeological field school and is actively involved in heritage conservation initiatives within the region.

Acabado first carried out excavations in Ifugao in 2007 while completing his doctoral research, and he has continued with numerous digs since 2012. Dating agricultural features archaeologically is especially difficult because cultivated soils are constantly disturbed. “They keep on churning,” he notes, as the soil is turned over every farming season. Unlike most archaeological sites, Ifugao remains a living landscape where fields are still in use and terrace walls frequently collapse due to age and wear. To overcome these challenges, Acabado developed a specialized research approach.

By studying terrace construction, he discovered that their foundations consist of large boulders that remain stable even after the retaining walls above them fall. On this basis, Acabado devised a statistical method to date surrounding soils, reasoning that despite continual disturbance of surface layers, materials sealed beneath terrace foundations would represent the earliest deposits.

Drawing on contemporary Ifugao oral traditions, investigating likely migration routes, and mapping pathways that followed river systems from the lowlands into the highlands, he identified a pattern in which dates became progressively younger at higher elevations. From this, he proposed that early migrants settled first in areas that were easier to cultivate and control. Acabado and his colleagues also sought direct evidence of wet-rice cultivation at Old Kiyyangan, believed to be the earliest Ifugao village and settled around a thousand years ago. “It wasn’t until 1650 that we see a clear, unambiguous appearance of wet rice and also grasses associated with wet rice,” Acabado explains.

Researchers analyzed twelve sediment samples taken from two excavation trenches for pollen, phytoliths, and starch. While the earliest rice traces appear in terrace sediments dating to about 675 years ago, a substantial increase is only evident between roughly 470 and 530 years ago, supporting a relatively late expansion of wet-rice agriculture in Ifugao. The team also examined residues from cooking pots to reconstruct precolonial diets, uncovering evidence of taro and a sugarcane-like plant, but no wet rice. “With that knowledge,” Acabado notes, “we argue that there would have been terraces in the region, but not for rice.” Early terraces likely resembled the small-scale systems used for taro in Hawai‘i and other Pacific islands. Only after Spanish arrival, accompanied by population growth, did large-scale wet-rice production develop, giving rise to the iconic sculpted landscape of Ifugao.

At first, Acabado assumed that wet-rice cultivation would coincide with population expansion because it yields more food than taro. “It also has a longer shelf life—much, much longer,” he says, noting that rice can be stored for up to twenty years under ideal conditions, whereas taro lasts no more than two weeks. Subsequent research, however, showed that wet-rice agriculture supported only about ten percent of the population. Most people continued to rely on other carbohydrate sources, including sweet potatoes, taro, and dry rice grown in swidden fields. Paddy rice, by contrast, remained largely an elite food, accessible mainly to the upper strata of society.

Are the Cordilleras Rice Terraces linked to the Spanish

Contrary to earlier assumptions, research now shows that the Ifugao of the colonial period were not isolated from the wider world. Archaeological discoveries of ceramics and glass beads indicate sustained contact and trade with China and other parts of Asia between 1600 and 1800. During this period, the Ifugao also introduced new domesticated animals, including pigs and water buffalo, into the highlands.

Why, then, did the Ifugao adopt wet-rice cultivation instead of continuing to rely on taro? This question lies at the core of Acabado’s argument. With the arrival of the Spanish in the Philippines, the Ifugao strengthened and centralized their power in the mountains. They shifted to an agricultural system that demanded complex social organization to regulate water control, labor, land access, and shared resources. Land ownership became concentrated among the upper classes, while lower-status groups provided the labor. Acabado contends that wet-rice farming was less an economic decision than a strategy for structuring society.

Rituals accompanied every phase of the agricultural cycle, and anthropological studies consistently describe such rituals as crucial mechanisms for social cohesion and collective organization. Acabado argues that this level of organization enabled the Ifugao to resist Spanish domination as a unified society. “It was just really amazing how the data fell into place to support the model,” observes John Peterson, a member of the IAP and director of the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at the University of Guam. With decades of archaeological experience in the American Southwest and the Pacific, Peterson notes that IAP findings suggest early Ifugao taro terraces date back about 1,500 years. These earlier terraces, he argues, prepared the landscape for the later expansion into wet-rice paddies.

To test the feasibility of rapid terrace construction, researchers used simple tools and materials similar to those available to early Ifugao communities to build their own terrace system. In just eleven days, the team completed a ten-level structure of stone walls more than six feet high. “It is not unthinkable that [early Ifugao] were able to modify the landscape in a very short amount of time,” Acabado explains.

Threats to the Philippines Cordilleras Rice Terraces

By 2001, around 30 percent of the rice terraces lay abandoned as many Ifugao began migrating to urban areas in search of other work. The land’s deterioration led the terraces to be inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger. To address concerns sustainable tourism initiatives like the Banaue Rice Terraces Restoration Project, launched in 2016 to raise funds and renew interest, aims to bring younger farmers back to the terraces and use and maintain them. [Source: Mike Dilger and Rico Hizon, BBC, April 14, 2018]

“There is a danger that these beautiful areas will turn into urban jungles,” Edison Molanida, the national culture commission’s World Heritage sites manager, told AFP. “One of the main threats is the rapid pace of development in the area. And by rapid pace, we mean unmanaged development.” Once-picturesque villages are increasingly marked by the disorderly features of poor Philippine towns: unsightly multi-storey concrete buildings, polluting diesel vehicles, and makeshift shanties with tin roofs. Introduced pests, including giant Indonesian earthworms, are inflicting serious damage on the terrace walls, causing sections to collapse. [Source: Karl Malakunas, AFP, May 31, 2015]

In Mayoyao, one of the region’s most scenic villages, local officials say the worms, along with snails originally introduced as a protein source, pose the greatest threat to the terraces. Television and the internet are also eroding traditional work ethics, which are essential to maintaining the labour-intensive rice fields.“When our parents told us to go and work, we obeyed,” said Margaret Licnachan, 38, a rice farmer and mother of four, as she sat in the stone courtyard of her home in Mayoyao.“But today, our children refuse to work in the terraces. They are lazy.” Molanida described the “abandonment of rice-growing culture” by many Ifugao as one of the gravest dangers facing the region. “If the younger generation loses interest in rice culture and moves to the cities or adopts modern lifestyles, who will tend the terraces?” he asked.

Mayoyao vice mayor Jimmy Padchanan said elders were working hard—and successfully—to manage the advance of modern life.“We cannot deny the effects of modernisation on our culture,” Padchanan said. “But it is not all bad. We are blending the old with the new while preserving many of our values.” He expressed confidence that the rice terraces and ancient traditions would withstand the pressures of the 21st century. “The Mayoyao rice terraces will continue to be passed down from generation to generation,” he said. “They will endure as long as the Mayoyao people are here.” Residents also argue that they have the right to development and to enjoy modern conveniences, and should not be forced to live in preserved, fossilised communities.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Philippines Tourism websites, Philippines government websites, UNESCO, Wikipedia, Lonely Planet guides, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Japan News, Yomiuri Shimbun, Compton's Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last Updated in February 2026