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The Sarasins' Collection of Historical Sri Lankan Crania

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The Sarasins' Collection of Historical Sri Lankan Crania Anthropological Science Advance Publication Material Report The Sarasins’ Collection of Historical Sri Lankan Crania Samanti Kulatilake1* 1Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Mount Royal University, 4825 Mount Royal Gate SW, Calgary, AB, Canada T3E 6K6 Received 20 May 2019; accepted 28 April 2020 Abstract 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 explo- ration 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 Lan- kan 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 chew- ing 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 crani- al 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. Key words: Sri Lanka, Wannila Atto, Vedda, Tamil, Sinhala those ‘colonized’ from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Introduction Among the data and collections acquired by the Sarasins In 1883, Swiss naturalists Paul and Fritz Sarasin em- were over 400 artifacts, 500 photographs, and the skeletal barked on their first journey to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to remains of over 90 individuals affiliated with diverse ethnic study an amphibian species, the Ceylon caecilians, and ele- groups of Sri Lanka (Sarasin and Sarasin, 1908; Schmid, phant embryonic development (Sarasin and Sarasin, 1886, 2012). Notable among the collection is the large number of 1893). Their expeditions were privately funded and their crania of the ‘Vedda’ people (since the term ‘Vedda’ has associated research for the Museum of Ethnology Basel, been used in a derogatory sense within Sri Lanka, it is placed Switzerland was conducted on an honorary basis (Schmid, within quotation marks in this paper to avoid such pejorative 2012). In their four subsequent expeditions to Sri Lanka (in associations). They are more appropriately known as Wan- 1890, 1902, 1907, and 1925), the Sarasins pivoted their at- nila Atto (forest people) or ‘Adivasi’ (original inhabitants) tention from zoological studies to anthropological research and appear in the literature also spelt as ‘Vanniyaletto,’ on the Indigenous ‘Vedda’ people of the island. German bio- ‘Wannilaeto,’ and ‘Wanniya-laeto.’ The ‘Vedda’ people were medical scientist Rudolph Virchow was among the first to considered by the Sarasins as a society on the verge of disap- recognize the biological links shared by South Asian Indige- pearance (Sarasin and Sarasin, 1893, 1907). The Sarasins’ nous groups (Virchow, 1886), and it is suggested that his collection at Basel comprises the largest single collection of work inspired the Sarasins to conduct detailed studies of the ‘Vedda’ crania curated in a single museum or collection. A ‘Vedda’ people (Schwidetzky, 1983). In this material report, smaller, yet notable, number of crania belonging to the Tamil context is provided for the Sarasins’ collection, as an exam- and Sinhala people from several parts of the island are also ple of a skeletal series representing the biological heritage of included in the Sarasins’ collection (Figure 1, Table 1). The main objective of this report is to present craniometric data and assess morphological variation among the ‘Vedda’ and * Correspondence to: Samanti Kulatilake, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Mount Royal University, 4825 Mount Royal Gate other Sri Lankan ethnic groups using this valuable dataset. SW, Calgary, AB, Canada T3E 6K6. The raw data are provided as an online supplementary E-mail: [email protected] source to facilitate future studies. Published online 8 August 2020 Sri Lankans today are representatives of the original in- in J-STAGE (www.jstage.jst.go.jp) DOI: 10.1537/ase.200428 habitants of the island and later arrivals, forming a multieth- © 2020 The Anthropological Society of Nippon 1 2 S. KULATILAKE Anthropological Science mainstream Sinhala and Tamil cultures of the island over the centuries (Spittel, 1950; Wijesekera, 1964; Dharmadasa and Samarasinghe, 1990; de Silva and Punchihewa, 2011; Attanapola and Lund, 2013). Although there are no reliable data, people who self-identify as ‘Vedda’ today, would ac- count for less than 1% of the national population. Several reports on the Sarasins’ collection exist. These include the multivolume original reports by the Sarasins (Sarasin and Sarasin, 1893), where they describe the physi- cal anthropology of the ‘Vedda,’ Tamil, and Sinhala groups. They used several existing methods to develop a graphing system on cranial variation (Sarasin and Sarasin, 1893: 124–150), the so-called ‘Sarasinian cranial curves’ (Schmid, 2012). Duckworth (1894) cited several measures and cranial indices reported by the Sarasins on ‘Vedda’ and Tamil crania to describe two crania collected from Nagyr, in present-day Pakistan. Hill published two studies on the ‘Vedda’ people’s biological traits (Hill, 1932, 1941) that referred to the Sarasins’ collection. The craniometric data published by Hill are primarily based on collections held in Great Britain, such as the Duckworth collection in Cambridge, and his focus was on the anthropometry and somatometry of the living ‘Vedda’ people of his time (Hill, 1941). Reports that refer- ence the Sarasins’ collection published in the 1970s include those by Kennedy (1971) and Kaufmann (1977). Kennedy enumerated the collection of ‘Vedda’ skeletal remains in the Sarasins’ collection in Basel and provided context for the collection, while referring to other collections of ‘Vedda’ skeletal material curated in several countries (Sri Lanka, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, Australia, and India). How- Figure 1. Map of locations in Sri Lanka where skeletal remains ever, some of the collections and/or specimens are reported were collected by the Sarasins. (Map credits: Pam MacQuarrie.) as missing from the repositories or were destroyed during the Second World War (e.g. the collection of the Royal Col- lege of Surgeons, London). An unpublished report by Bul- Table 1. The Sarasins’ collection: sample of observed adult crania beck and colleagues notes the relevance of the Basel collec- from Sri Lanka by ethnic group tion in their exploration of human migrations to Australasia Ethnic group Male Female Total (personal communication). Other studies have used cranio- ‘Vedda’ 22 19 41 metric data on ‘Vedda’ skeletal material housed in Great Tamil 14 10 24 Britain and Sri Lanka (Warusawithana-Kulatilake, 1996; Sinhala 12 6 18 Kulatilake, 2000; Stock et al., 2007), but do not include the Sinhala/Tamil 2 0 2 Sarasins’ collection at Basel. Apart from the original de- scriptions provided by the collectors (Sarasin and Sarasin, 1893), the crania of the Tamil and Sinhala people in this collection have received little to no attention in early ac- nic, multicultural, and multireligious society. Anthropologi- counts, due to a focus on the Indigenous ‘Vedda’ people. cal and archaeological studies situate the ‘Vedda’ people as This report is the first to provide data on the Tamil and the descendants of the original hunter-gatherer people of Sinhala groups in the Sarasins’ collection, along with the Mesolithic Sri Lanka (Tennent, 1860; Kennedy, 1971; ‘Vedda’ data. Craniometric data published on this collection Deraniyagala, 1992; Kennedy, 2000; Hawkey, 2002; by the Sarasins (1893) and Kaufmann (1977) include a Kulatilake, 2016). In addition, the biological and cultural smaller set of measurements. Furthermore, systematic re- relationships between the ‘Veddoid’ people of southern and cording following the techniques and methods of Howells central India (e.g. Kadar, Chenchu) and the ‘Vedda’ of Sri (1973) was not previously undertaken. Therefore, this report Lanka have been discussed in the literature (Virchow, 1886; is the first to provide detailed cranial measurements that can Duckworth, 1894; Kennedy, 2000; Majumder, 2010). The be replicated and compared with other datasets of global Tamil and Sinhala people, who were later arrivals, now con- samples. Results from univariate and multivariate statistical stitute the majority of the population in Sri Lanka. Today, the analyses are also presented. Sinhala ethnic group makes up about 75% of the population, while the Sri Lankan and Indian Tamil ethnic groups togeth- Materials and Methods er make up approximately 14% of the population.
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