New evidence

Work at this World Heritage site has been based on the research orientated question of how and when the first recognisable urban form emerged in Sri Lanka. According to most scholars, Anuradhapura was expected to have been founded in c.250 BC as a direct result of contact with north Indian cities, which themselves had emerged some two hundred years earlier in the Ganges. The results of the research project's collaborative work have, however, overturned this belief and show evidence of the presence of an urban form at the site as early as c.400 BC. This suggests that the mechanism which were responsible for the emergence of cities in north India were presumably a subcontinental wide phenomena. Indeed antecedents for the first city at Anuradhapura can now be identified in its archaeological sequence which stretches as far back as the Iron Age.

Another task of the above-mentioned research project was to help the Government Department of Archaeology of Sri Lanka to define the full extent of the ancient city so that it could be adequately protected and managed. This was because there is a major threat to the site from an encroachment of the site by modern settlements and farming land. The group due to restraints of time and resourced limited their research to an archaeological geophysical survey. Through a combination of old land maps and surviving topography areas were identified in the surrounding paddyfields where shallow linear depressions suggested the presence of a silted moat. Areas of jungle were cleared at the edges of the mound and set up grids which stretched down into the paddyfields and used a resistivity meter to survey areas on the east, south and north of the mound. This survey identified substantial anomalies which were then tested with a hand auger. The auger confirmed that a silted rock-cut moat some 5 metres deep and 40 metres wide surrounding the city had been successfully identified. This work has enabled this UNESCO World Heritage site to be protected and curated.

Royal medium

Another important area of Bradford University's research programme at Anuradhapura has been in connection with the early development of writing in South Asia. For over a hundred and fifty years scholars have believed that the first script was developed c. 250 BC in the north of the subcontinent as a result of interaction with the Persian empire. The emergent script was first used a royal medium and then became widely available for other uses such as helping merchants keep accounts. Following this initial development in the north it was assumed that the use of this script slowly spread south until it reached Sri Lanka one hundred years later. However, the group's work at Anuradhapura has overturned this theory by yielding evidence that the earliest script, known as Brahmi, was present in Sri Lanka from as early as c.450 BC. Moreover, there was evidence of a developmental sequence which saw the script alter in form from large irregular and rather crude characters to small, well formed ones. This early date of this sequence suggests the very development and adoption of the script itself. All the early inscriptions were found inscribed on ceramic vessel and consist of personal names in the dative cases - signifying ownership. It is suggested by the researchers that the names do not necessarily refer to the owner of the ceramic vessel but of the contents. Ceramic vessels are often used today in Sri Lanka as containers and goods are often transported in them. It is also suggested that the initial adoption of a script was connected with a demand for means of ownership to facilitate long distance trade and exchange and was only later adopted as a royal medium.

The Bradford University's collaborative work at Anuradhapura in the summer of 1994 has helped to preserve one of UNESCO's World Heritage sites as well as to strengthen Bradford's academic links with South Asia.