Sunday Times 2
National Trust lecture on Feb 24
View(s):The National Trust of Sri Lanka’s monthly lecture on Tuesday, February 24 at 6 pm will be on ‘New Investigations into the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Rainforest Prehistory of Sri Lanka’. The lecture will be delivered by Dr Oshan Wedage at the Auditorium of the College of Surgeons of Sri Lanka, No 6, Independence Avenue, Colombo 7.
(For those who join online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCCv9-2Tcgw)
This lecture presents the findings of research based on the datasets obtained from new excavation, zoo-archaeological, archaeobotanical, lithic, bone tool, and symbolic material culture analyses at two cave sites in the tropical rainforest zone of Sri Lanka, Fa-Hien Lena and Beli-lena Kitulgala. In doing so, it provides the earliest dates for definitive human occupation of the island and detailed insights into the resources used by members of our species as they rapidly colonised the southern tip of South Asia.
Dr Oshan Wedage, Senior lecturer of the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, obtained his BA (Honours) in Archaeology from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, MSc from the Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute of Archaeology, Pune, India and his PhD from Max Planck Institute for Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, in 2020.
He is currently Consultant Director for Archaeology, Uva Province Project, Central Culture Fund. He has published several research papers and been awarded the ‘President’s Award’ four times by the Government of Sri Lanka.
