Types of Negritos in the Philippine Islands: A Look at a 1910 Anthropological Study In 1910

In 1910, American anatomist and anthropologist Robert Bennett Bean published “Types of Negritos in the Philippine Islands” in American Anthropologist. The paper attempted to classify the Indigenous Negrito peoples of the Philippines according to physical appearance, using photographs collected from communities throughout the islands.

Bean wrote that Negrito populations could be found across a large geographic area, from Palawan in the south to northern Luzon. His study included photographs of people from Bataan and the Mariveles Mountains, Zambales, Isabela, Pampanga, Cagayan, Palawan, Panay and other regions.

The photographs came from several colonial-era officials and researchers, including Dean C. Worcester, A. Reed, Charles Martin, E. Y. Miller and M. L. Miller. Rather than conducting a modern genetic or population study, Bean relied heavily on visible physical characteristics captured in these photographs.

Bean divided the people he examined into three supposed physical “types”: “Primitive,” “Iberian” and “Australoid.” He proposed that the Australoid population came first and that the other characteristics appeared through later population mixing. He also attempted to use features such as head and facial shape, noses, ears, hair, skin color and stature to identify ancestry.

For example, Bean described a man from the Mariveles region as displaying what he called an “Iberian” type. He speculated that the man's appearance might represent a distant mixture between Negrito and Iberian populations. Another photograph, showing a chief from the Mariveles Mountains across Manila Bay, was classified by Bean as “Australoid.”

Bean considered the study significant partly because he believed no previous research had systematically classified the ears of Indigenous Philippine populations. He also argued that individual Negrito communities had experienced both internal marriage and varying degrees of intermixture with surrounding populations.

The paper is particularly interesting today as a historical document showing how early-20th-century anthropologists attempted to understand human diversity. However, its terminology and racial framework should not be confused with modern anthropology or genetics. Categories such as Bean's “Primitive,” “Iberian” and “Australoid” types were based largely on physical appearance and racial typologies that modern researchers no longer consider reliable ways of dividing humanity into biological groups.

Today, the Indigenous peoples historically grouped under the broad term “Philippine Negritos” include distinct populations such as the Aeta, Agta, Ati and Batak, each with its own history and cultural identity. Modern genetic research approaches their ancestry through population history, migration and DNA rather than Bean's early racial classifications.

Despite its outdated conclusions, Bean's 1910 paper remains useful for understanding the history of anthropology and the way Indigenous Philippine populations were documented and interpreted during the American colonial period. It also preserves photographic and geographic information about communities whose histories extend far deeper than the colonial researchers who attempted to classify them.

Source: Robert Bennett Bean, “Types of Negritos in the Philippine Islands,” American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 12, No. 2, April–June 1910, pp. 220–236.