Chief Uruwarige Wannilaththo, head of the Vedda tribe, inspected the aboriginal artefacts returned by Switzerland during an exposition to the media at the Lotus Tower in Colombo.
The artefacts, which were taken to Basel around the end of the 19th century, include 42 human skeletons and skulls of Veddas, weapons like arrows and bows, and everyday items such as bags, plates, and pots.
The Ministry of Buddhasasana, Religious, and Cultural Affairs, said they were returned in response to official requests from the Sri Lankan government and the Vedda tribe.
Through her archival research in Basel, Sri Lankan multimedia artist and activist Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige contributed to this return: “In 2019, during the research based art project about the Basel Restitution of our ancestors and their memories forgotten colonial history – ‘Voices from an archived Silence’ I was invited to study the anthropometric image archives and Swiss cousin brothers Fritz & Paul Sarasin’s scientific expedition to Ceylon (1883 – 1907).
During my investigations at the Swiss National Archive in Basel which led me also to the Iconothèque of the Musée Quai Branly in Paris, I found most of the photographs of the people of Ceylon had been misplaced in archival folders dedicated to Africa, such as ‘Somalia’, Polynesian island ‘Samoa’, New Caledonia or India and also in a folder named ‘Divers’.”
At first, the ancestral remains will stay in Colombo and be studied by researchers. Earlier, in 2019, the University of Edinburgh returned nine Adivasi skulls. These were directly transferred to the Adivasi.
