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Others collapsed under the weight of hierarchy, exploitation, and violence. These histories
are not templates to follow, but reservoirs of insight—sources from which we might learn,
and through which we might recover forgotten alternatives.

Seen in this way, deep time does not render the past remote. It renders it urgent. It gives
us a temporal perspective to understand that sustainability is not only a matter of
technology or policy. It is also a matter of memory, judgment, and imagination. It is about
understanding long histories of human decision-making—ethical, social, ecological—and
drawing from them the humility to act differently now.

From these long histories, archaeology offers not just evidence of collapse and ruin, but also
of resilience—of communities adapting, surviving, and restoring life in the midst of
difficulty.
But sustainability is not only ecological. It is also social and cultural:
• How do communities preserve memory after displacement?
• How do people maintain identity when their histories are silenced or erased?
• How can we sustain not only ecosystems, but also a sense of dignity,
continuity, and belonging?
These are questions archaeology can help us ask—especially in Sri Lanka, where the past
has too often been used to divide, rather than to connect. So, before we turn to Sri Lanka’s
archaeological inheritance more directly, I want to leave you with a thought:
Sustainability is not simply a scientific concept. It is an ethical one. It calls on us not merely
to manage resources, but to reimagine futures where life in all its forms—human and non-
human— can endure and flourish with dignity.

Sri Lanka — Past in Conflict, Heritage at Risk
Let us now turn more directly to our own country. Sri Lanka is often celebrated for its
ancient civilizations—Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Sigiriya, Tissamaharama. These sites
dominate our national imagination and form the symbolic bedrock of state-sponsored
heritage. But behind this celebration lies a far more complex—and at times deeply
troubling—history. From its very inception, archaeology in Sri Lanka was shaped by
colonial frameworks. The British did not merely excavate; they classified, ranked, and
codified. Civilizations were ordered according to an evolutionary hierarchy. Cultures were
assigned periods of “rise” and “decline.” Monumentality was privileged over everyday
life. And above all, local voices, embodied traditions, and living meanings were sidelined.

This legacy did not end with independence. The newly post-colonial state inherited not only
the institutions of archaeology, but its conceptual scaffolding. Archaeology was seamlessly
absorbed into nationalist ideology. It became a tool for the post-independence nation-
building project, one which largely celebrated a Sinhala-Buddhist antiquity while rendering
other histories—Tamil, Muslim, coastal, upland, and syncretic—marginal, fragmentary, or
invisible.

Even today, well into the 21st century, we continue to do archaeology through patterns of
thought and methodological habits inherited from the colonial era. The “dead white
archaeologists,” as I sometimes say, are not entirely dead. They live on—under new names,
with updated tools, but often with unexamined assumptions. Populist archaeology,
amplified through national media and public television, continues to frame the discipline
through the lens of colonial-era antiquarianism. Its focus remains on glorification and
proof, rather than on inquiry and critique.