[3] In 1936, Scott won a three-year scholarship to the Episcopalian-affiliated Cranbrook School in Michigan, United States, where he excelled academically and became interested in pursuing a career as an archeologist.

With the general expulsion of foreigners from China in 1949, he followed some of his teachers to Yale University where he enrolled, graduating in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chinese language and literature.

Known to his friends as "Scotty", he became a focus for pilgrimage by numerous foreign and Filipino academics, entertaining them in his book-lined study while he puffed away on his trademark cigar.

[6] Schlagel recounts Scott saying that he "considered the time in jail behind bars to be one of the best of his life, because he was able to have long in-depth conversations with all the most prominent anti-Marcos activists.

[7] Another notable fellow prisoner was a young Butch Dalisay, who is said to have put caricature versions of both Scott and Salazar in his book "Killing Time in a Warm Place.

[5] One particular article written by Scott, titled "The Igorot Defense of Northern Luzon" first published in May 1970, was often tagged by the dictatorship's military forces as "subversive," although it was actually about incidents which took place from 1576 to 1896, the Spanish colonial era.

[9] Scott observed the Igorot people of the Cordillera region had preserved elements of pre-colonial culture to a greater degree, and over a wider area, than could be found elsewhere in the Philippines.

Scott's dissertation was published that year by the University of Santo Tomas Press as Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History.

Scott argues that the difficulties the Spaniards encountered extending their rule in the face of local resistance resulted in the inhabitants of the region being classified as a 'savage' race separate to the more tractable lowland Filipinos.

Scott adopted a similar approach in Cracks in the Parchment Curtain[16] in which he tries to glean a picture of pre-colonial Philippine society from early Spanish sources.

This project was criticized by the Asianist Benedict Anderson who argued that it yielded a vision of Philippine society filtered through "late medieval" Spanish understanding.

[21] Scott died unexpectedly on 4 October 1993, aged 72,[2] at the St Luke's Hospital in Quezon City, following what was considered to have been a routine gall bladder operation.