Kantarodai, Sri Lanka. Pottery Analysis: Preliminary Overview of the ›Corpus‹ of Ceramic Sherds. Research Carried Out between July and September 2023

Abstract

In the summer of 2023, a new excavation was conducted at the Kantarodai site (North Sri Lanka) as part of a collaboration between the Department of Archaeology of Sri Lanka and the German Archaeological Institute (KAAK-Bonn). The research provides a preliminary overview of the ceramic material from the excavation, conducted as part of a larger PhD project aimed at developing a tentative quantification of the pottery that travelled across the Arabian Sea between the 3rd century BCE and the 6th century CE. The excavation revealed a continuous occupation of the site from 750 BCE to 345 CE. The ceramic analysis provided evidence for a rich and varied collection of artifacts, most of which can be directly compared with the well-established ceramic typology from Tissamaharama (South Sri Lanka).