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Headland's latest academic project, co-authored with his wife Janet Headland, was recently published, in November 2007. Titled Agta Demographic Database: Chronicle of a Hunter-Gatherer Community in Transition, it is a mammoth 4,000-page population chronicle of all members of an Agta Negrito people in the Philippines. It is based on the Headlands' more than 45 years of demographic research on the Agta people. They consider it their most significant contribution to science. To see a brief description to this, click the link in this paragraph.By the turn of the 21st century, the Agta had changed from a hunter-gatherer society to a community of post-foragers living now as landless peasants in what was until the 1960s the largest remaining area of rain forest in the Philippines. The Headlands have recorded every birth, death, in-migration, and out-migration of this population since 1950. (See their statement “Four Decades Among the Agta.”)The Agta population dynamics was first described in the Headlands 1998 book co-authored with demographer John Early titled Population Dynamics of a Philippine Rain Forest People. Now the raw data on which that book was based are available online to demographers and students (and to the Agta themselves) in this new publication.
Tom and Janet Headland continue to make field trips to the Philippines (with their last trip in 2008) to update their demographic data on the San Ildefonso Agta population. This people-group numbered 283 in January 2006. The Headlands have recorded every birth, death, marriage, divorce, and in- and out-migration of this group since 1950. The vital statistics data collected in 2008 will be added into the published Database by the end of the year.
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Since 2001, Headland has continued to teach an anthropology course each summer at the University of North Dakota, with a component in ethnographic research methods. One course assignment is typically to find an interesting subculture somewhere in the area, make friends with the 'natives' of that 'microculture,' and do participant observation with those people during the summer, and write a paper on it. A list of the subcultures studied by Headland's students both at UND and formerly at University of Texas at Arlington can be found at Subcultures Studied by Headland's Students.
Headland no longer teaches anthropology at UTA, though he continues to serve occasionally on graduate student committees there. During the regular school year he is stationed at the USA headquarters of his home institution, SIL International, where he serves as an international anthropology consultant.
A review of the Headlands' past research in the Philippines is described elsewhere on this website.