Abstract
The site of Batadomba-lena in the Wet Zone of Sri Lanka, yields osseous technologies in association with Homo sapiens back to c.36,000 cal years BP. Alongside isolated finds from the nearby site of Fa Hien-lena, these bone tools are the earliest of their kind in South Asia and can contribute to discussions of the adaptive context of osseous technology during Late Pleistocene human dispersals beyond Africa. Here we describe 204 bone points recovered from the Batadomba-lena rockshelter during excavations conducted in the 1980s and 2000s. Contextual analysis, alongside detailed stratigraphic and chronological information, indicates that Homo sapiens in Sri Lanka were using osseous technologies as part of a dedicated rainforest subsistence strategy by at least 36,000 cal years BP. Future work on the Sri Lankan material should acknowledge the importance of placing bone toolkits within their wider environmental and social context.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Dr. S.U. Deraniyagala, Dr Senarath Dissanayaka, L.V. De Mel, Jude Perera, and all of the members of the Excavations Branch at the Department of Archaeology, Sri Lanka, and Prof. Jagath Weerasinghe, Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology, Sri Lanka, for their technical and financial support in the excavation and interpretation of the Batadomba-lena sequence and its material culture. We would also like to extend our thanks to R.M. Kushumpriya Rajapaksa (Polonnaruwa Project of the Cultural Triangle, Central Cultural Fund of Sri Lanka) for his help with photography. Finally, we would like to thank Klint Janulis, Michelle Langley, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. N.P. was supported by the Australian National University and Dr David Bulbeck during his 2005 excavation and interpretation of Batadomba-lena . P.R. is currently supported by a doctoral research award from the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) (grant no. 1322282), UK. M.P. acknowledges the support of the European Research Council (grant no. 295719).
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Perera, N., Roberts, P., Petraglia, M. (2016). Bone Technology from Late Pleistocene Caves and Rockshelters of Sri Lanka. In: Langley, M. (eds) Osseous Projectile Weaponry. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0899-7_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0899-7_12
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