Note 18 — Economic Life

Many writers who have discussed the rice culture of the East Indies are inclined to credit its introduction to Indian colonists,18 but Page 396Campbell19 holds to the belief that it was practised centuries before the Christian era and prior to the Hindu invasion of Java. There seems to be no dissent, however, among these writers to the belief that its introduction antedated the arrival of the European in the Orient by several centuries. The fact that dry land farming, carried on with planting sticks and the like, is still found among the Igorot and Tinguian, and for that matter all over the Philippines, cannot be advanced as an argument that the irrigated fields are of recent date, for upland fields and primitive tools are still used in Java and Sumatra, where, as we have just seen, the wet field culture is an old possession.