The Precolonial Visayan Practice of Skull DeformationWhen I speak of the precolonial Philippines, I always start with rhetorics about pseudohistory. I mean, I always remind my peers that we should stop believing that Maharlika Kingdom legend. Everything about this so-called precolonial kingdom was the product of a hoax, concocted by a professional informal settler for financial gains. Historians already debunked this romanticized fantasy about a long-lost sprawling kingdom, though letting go of this myth is a hard pill to swallow for some Filipinos. Understandably, Filipinos today longed for the memories of the precolonial past. Cultures and practices, untouched by colonization could add a new dimension to our identity, though believing on false history can’t change anything, or make things worse.
But as we learn more about our precolonial past, we realized that the truth is even more colorful than any pseudohistory floating ar