Vedda

Vedda, people of Sri Lanka who were that island’s aboriginal inhabitants prior to the 6th century bce. They adopted Sinhala and now no longer speak their own language. Ethnically, they are allied to the indigenous jungle peoples of southern India and to early populations in Southeast Asia. They have now been largely absorbed into the modern Sinhalese population; in 1911 they were reported to number about 5,300, by 1964 the government estimated their population at about 800, and by the 1970s they had virtually ceased to exist as a separate community.

The aboriginal material culture and subsistence patterns of the Vedda were extremely simple. They lived in caves and rock shelters, wore bark-cloth clothing, hunted game with bows and arrows, and gathered wild plants and honey. Their religion was essentially a cult of the dead; ancestral spirits were believed to enter the bodies of shamans, through whom they communicated with their descendants.