Review of Thomas N. Headland, Janet D. Headland, and Ray T. Uehara's Agta Demographic Database: Chronicle of a Hunter-gatherer Community in Transition (Dallas: SIL International, 2011)

Hum Nat (2011) 22:444446

DOI 10.1007/s12110-011-9127-3

Nancy Howell

Published online: 12 November 2011# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

Keywords Agta . Hunter-gatherers . Demographic database . Data archiving

This is not a book1 review, and the item cited above is not a book. Instead, I hope it is a prototype of the new-normal form of data sharing in anthropology: archived raw data collected by an investigator or a team of investigators, analyzed and reported, and then put in the public domain for colleagues to explore, share, compare with their own data, use to teach students methodology and analysis, and preserve for posterity. The Headlands and their computer consultant, co-author Ray T. Uehara, have given us a remarkable tool and model.

This is appropriate, because the Headlands are a remarkable couple. Simultaneously anthropologists and missionaries for the Summer Institute of Linguistics, they have lived with the Agta, Negrito people of the Philippine rain forest, for an extraordinarily long time (ca. 25 years), plus decades of occasional visits. Their three children were born and raised there. And they have maintained the data that they started collecting in the 1960s, so they now have a large and very detailed database on the Agta, including records on some 4,300 people. These records include very complete census and vital statistics information on the San Ildefonso Agta, a geographically restricted population of a few hundred people for whom the Headlands claim to know every birth, death, marriage, residential move, and economic event over a period of 60 years.

1SIL Language and Culture Documentation and Description 20, available online at http://www.sil.org/silepubs/abstract.asp?id=49227

Web End =www.sil.org/silepubs/ http://www.sil.org/silepubs/abstract.asp?id=49227

Web End =abstract.asp?id=49227 (version 2.0).

N. Howell (*)

Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 2J4e-mail: [email protected]

Review of Thomas N. Headland, Janet D. Headland, and Ray T. Ueharas Agta Demographic Database: Chronicle of a Hunter-gatherer Community in Transition (Dallas: SIL International, 2011)

Hum Nat (2011) 22:444446 445445

That the Headlands are conscientious recorders of local events is not rare in anthropology, but their achievement of such...