Burial Goods in the Philippines: An Attempt to Quantify Prestige Values

Abstract

It has always been the practice to relate materials interred with the dead as markers of status. The value assigned to these burial goods are most of the time from the value system of the researcher. However, the value systems of past cultures were most likely different from that of the researcher. In this paper, I am proposing an independent system from ethnographic analogy by which burial goods can be evaluated from an archaeological perspective.