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Sri Lanka Land Use and Settlement Patterns
The dominant pattern of human settlement during the last
2,500 years has consisted of village farming communities. Even in
the 1980s, the majority of people lived in small villages and
worked at agricultural pursuits. Traditional farming techniques
and life-styles revolve around two types of farming--"wet" and
"dry"--depending upon the availability of water
(see Sri Lanka - Agriculture
, ch. 3).
The typical settlement pattern in the rice-growing areas is a
compact group of houses or neighborhood surrounding one or
several religious centers that serve as the focus for communal
activities. Sometimes the houses may be situated along a major
road and include a few shops, or the village may include several
outlying hamlets. The life-sustaining rice fields begin where the
houses end and stretch into the distance. Some irrigated fields
may include other cash crops, such as sugarcane, or groves of
coconut trees. Palmyra trees grow on the borders of fields or
along roads and paths. Individual houses also may have vegetable
gardens in their compounds. During the rainy seasons and
thereafter, when the fields are covered by growing crops, the
village environment is intensely verdant.
The nature of agricultural pursuits in Sri Lanka has changed
over the centuries and has usually depended upon the availability
of arable land and water resources. In earlier times, when
villagers had access to plentiful forests that separated
settlements from each other, slash-and-burn agriculture was a
standard technique. As expanding population and commercial
pressures reduced the amount of available forestland, however,
slash-and-burn cultivation steadily declined in favor of
permanent cultivation by private owners. Until the thirteenth
century, the village farming communities were mainly on the
northern plains around Anuradhapura and then Polonnaruwa, but
they later shifted to the southwest
(see Sri Lanka - Decline of the Sinhalese Kingdom, 1200-1500
, ch. 1). In the 1980s, wide expanses of the
northern and eastern plains were sparsely populated, with
scattered villages each huddled around an artificial lake. The
Jaffna Peninsula, although a dry area, is densely populated and
intensively cultivated. The southwest contains most of the
people, and villages are densely clustered with little unused
land
(see Sri Lanka - Population
, this ch.). In the Central Highlands around
Kandy, villagers faced with limited flat land have developed
intricately terraced hillsides where they grow rice. In the 1970s
and 1980s, the wet cultivation area was expanding rapidly, as the
government implemented large-scale irrigation projects to restore
the dry zone to agricultural productivity. In the 1980s, the area
drained by the Mahaweli Ganga changed from a sparsely inhabited
region to a wet rice area similar to the southwest. Through such
projects, the government of Sri Lanka has planned to recreate in
the dry zone the lush, irrigated landscape associated with the
ancient Sinhalese civilization.
Beginning in the sixteenth century and culminating during the
British rule of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
plantation economy came to dominate large sections of the
highlands. Plantation farming resulted in a drastic reduction in
the natural forest cover and the substitution of domesticated
crops, such as rubber, tea, or cinnamon. It also brought about a
changed life-style, as the last hunting-and-gathering societies
retreated into smaller areas and laborers moved into the
highlands to work on plantations. Through the late twentieth
century, workers on large plantations lived in villages of small
houses or in "line rooms" containing ten to twelve units. The
numerous plantations of small landholders frequently included
attached hamlets of workers in addition to the independent houses
of the plantation owners.
The coastal belt surrounding the island contains a different
settlement pattern that has evolved from older fishing villages.
Separate fishing settlements expanded laterally along the coast,
linked by a coastal highway and a railway. The mobility of the
coastal population during colonial times and after independence
led to an increase in the size and number of villages, as well as
to the development of growing urban centers with outside
contacts. In the 1980s, it was possible to drive for many
kilometers along the southwest coast without finding a break in
the string of villages and bazaar centers merging into each other
and into towns.
Data as of October 1988
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