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10 Ruhuna Arts Student’s Annual Sessions (RASAS) -2025
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From Foraging to Farming: Re-examining Early Agricultural Practices in
Prehistoric Sri Lanka

D.V.G. Fernando
Department of History and Archaeology, University of Ruhuna
viyarafernando@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

This study re-examines how the prehistoric communities in Sri Lanka began to practice farming, drawing
primarily on existing archaeological and archaeobotanical research. In this context, the term Neolithic, which

is a controversial debate in the Sri Lankan setting, is used to describe the early appearance of cultivation and
related material culture on the island, rather than the full Neolithic package documented in mainland South
Asia. Evidence from sites such as Bellanbandipalassa and Dorawaka-kanda, including lithic tools, carbonized

rice and millet, and traces of habitation, indicates that cultivation was gradually integrated into foraging
lifeways between 4500 and 3500 BP. Stable isotope studies of human remains, as reported in earlier academic
research, further suggest subsistence strategies that blended domesticated cereals with wild resources. Some

scholars have also proposed that simple water-management methods may have been adopted in drier zones,
highlighting adaptive responses to different environments. By synthesising these findings, this paper argues
that agriculture in Sri Lanka developed incrementally through flexible, locally adapted strategies, rather than

through a sudden or uniform transition. The unique contribution of this research lies in its comparative re-
interpretation of existing evidence, situating Sri Lanka within wider South Asian debates on the diversity of

pathways from foraging to farming, and emphasising the distinctive island context of this transformation.

Keywords: Archaeobotanical, Early farming, Neolithic (Sri Lanka), Prehistoric subsistence

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