Scholars

Thomas N. Headland

Senior Anthropology Consultant
Adjunct Professor of Anthropology

Agta Demographic Database Released at National Anthropology Meeting

On November 23, 2007, the American Anthropological Association sent out a press release with the above title. It was their announcement of the publication that week of the mammoth publication produced by AAA fellow Thomas Headland and his wife Janet of the SIL International (formerly Summer Institute of Linguistics).

This 4,000-page electronic publication is titled Agta Demographic Database: Chronicle of a hunter-gatherer community in transition.Thomas Headland and his wife had worked on this compilation for a half-century. It is now available online free of charge for demographers, students, and others interested in the dynamics of hunter-gatherers and other traditional anthropological populations.

The AAA announcement said, in part,

“The American Anthropological Association announces the release of a new SIL on-line publication, Agta Demographic Database: Chronicle of a Hunter-Gatherer Community in Transition. This Database is the result of a fifty-year research project on the demography of the Agta, a Negrito hunter-gatherer population in the Philippines. SIL anthropologist Dr. Thomas Headland will demonstrate the Database in a formal [2-hour] poster session at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington DC on Thursday, 29 November.…

The database provides a keyhole glimpse into how humans may have lived and died in prehistory. Content will be of particular interest to anthropologists, students of human history, and demographers. Researchers may use these data to check these and other demographic parameters, as well as for testing their own hypotheses of prehistoric populations.

The Agta population has vital statistics that are extreme compared to industrialized humankind. Today's Agta have an infant mortality rate of 230/1000 (vs. 7/1000 in the USA), a high total fertility rate of 7.0, and a life expectancy of just 23 years (vs. 78 years in the USA).

The online Demographic Database consists of the records of 4,000 Agta individuals—who lived and died over the past 100 years—including the 600 Agta alive today.…

The main table shows 30 fields for each person, and links to four supporting data tables with 20 more fields for each person. There are 11 reference tables. Fields include body measurements, marriage and birth histories, genealogies, 645 facial photographs and other vital statistics with dates of births, deaths, migrations and marriages.”

The November 30, 2007, issue of SCIENCE (p.1357) also published a short review of the Agta Demographic Database where they said, in part,

“[This week] anthropologist Thomas Headland and his wife, Janet, put their unique database on the [Agta] tribe … online.… The disappearance of groups like the Agta means that such an effort will never be duplicated.… The database … will allow anthropologists, archaeologists, economists, and geneticists to test questions about societies before agriculture.”

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