The Sarasins’ Collection of Historical Sri Lankan Crania

Bibliographic Data

ID6135747
AuthorsSamanti Kulatilake (0000-0002-4217-3124, Mount Royal University, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume128
Issue3
Pages119-128
Publication date2020-01-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnthropological Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0918-7960 • E-ISSN: 1348-8570
PublisherAnthropological Society of Nippon (PUBLISHER • JP)
DOI10.1537/ase.200428
OpenAlexW3047664292
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited20

Swiss naturalists Paul and Fritz Sarasin visited Sri Lanka on five occasions. Their later visits were focused on anthropological research on the Indigenous Wannila Atto (‘Vedda’) people and exploration of prehistoric settlements in Sri Lanka. Among the Sarasins’ anthropological and archaeological collections are skeletal material of several ethnic groups of Sri Lanka belonging to the 19th and early 20th centuries. This collection is curated at the Natural History Museum of Basel, Switzerland. The ethnolinguistic groups represented in the Sarasins’ collection include the ‘Vedda,’ Tamil, and Sinhala people of Sri Lanka, and it constitutes the largest ‘Vedda’ cranial collection housed at a single institution. The objective of this paper is to compare cranial variation of the Indigenous ‘Vedda’ and other Sri Lankan ethnic groups using this important dataset, while publishing the raw craniometric data for further studies. Observations on the dentition show that the Tamil and Sinhala individuals had high incidences of caries and dental abscesses that are typically associated with agriculturalists and that cribra orbitalia associated with iron deficiency was relatively common among all three ethnic groups. Betel quid chewing for recreational and cultural purposes, a practice that is widespread even today, had left dark stains on the teeth of many individuals of all groups in the sample. Multivariate statistical analyses on the craniometric data show that there is significant overlap among the three ethnic groups in terms of cranial shape. These findings underscore the importance of considering the ‘Vedda,’ Tamil, and Sinhala groups from Sri Lanka as closely related, due to gene flow over millennia

Ancient history · Archaeology · Crania · Geography · South asia · Sri lanka · Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies · History · Paleopathology and ancient diseases · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology

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