Primitive Time-reckoning: A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoplesNilsson, Martin P. (Martin Persson)
History
Primitive Time-reckoning: A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples
Nilsson, Martin P. (Martin Persson)
Chronology
The agricultural year is most clearly defined among the
rice-cultivating peoples of the Indian Archipelago, by whom the
seasons are determined according to the state of the rice. It is
said, for example, in speaking of an event, that it happened at the
blossoming or harvesting of the rice[313]. Among the Bahau, a Dyak
tribe of Borneo, the year is divided into eight periods according
to the various kinds of labour carried on in the rice-field:--the
clearing of the brushwood (to prepare the fields for cultivation),
the felling of the trees, the burning of the wood felled, the
sowing or celebration of the seed-time festival, the weeding, the
harvest, the conclusion of the harvest, the celebration of the new
rice-year[314]. The Bontoc Igorot, as has been mentioned, divide the
year into two parts, the period of rice-culture and the other period.
There are however other periods which vary in different villages as
regards name, number, and duration, but are everywhere called after
the characteristic occupations that follow one another in the course
of the year. Eight of these together make up the calendar, and seven
of them have to do with the rice-cultivation. Each period receives
its name from the occupation which characterises its beginning, and
keeps this name until the beginning of the next period, even when
the occupation that characterised it had ceased some time before. To
_cha-kon_ belong:--(1) _i-na-na_, the first period in the year, the
time, as it is said, of no more work in the rice sementeras, when
practically all the fields are prepared and transplanted; in 1903
it began on Feb. 11 and it lasts about 3 months, continuing until
the time of the first rice-harvest in May, in 1903 till May 2; (2)
_la-tub_, the time of the first harvests, lasts about four weeks and
ends about June 1; (3) _cho-ok_, the time when most of the rice is
harvested, fills about 4 weeks, in 1903 till July 2; (4) _li-pas_,
the season of ‘no more palay-harvest’, lasts for about 10 or 15 days.
To the half-year _ka-sip_, belong:--(5) _ba-li-ling_, which takes
its name from the general planting of camotes and is the only one
of the calendar periods not named from the rice industry: it lasts
about 6 weeks, or nearly to the end of August; (6) _sa-gan-ma_, the
time when the sementeras which are to be used as seed-beds for the
rice are put into condition, the earth being turned three several
times, lasts about 2 months: on Nov. 15, 1902 the seed was just
peeping from the kernels; the seed is sown immediately after the
third turning of the earth, which thus ended early in November; (7)
_pa-chog_, the period of seed-sowing, begins about Nov. 10; although
the seed-sowing does not last many days, the period continues for 5
or 6 weeks; (8) _sa-ma_, the last period, in which the sementeras are
prepared for receiving the young plants, and in which these seedlings
are transplanted from the seed-beds, lasts nearly 7 weeks, from about
Dec. 20 to Feb. 10. The Igorot often say e. g.
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