Village Settlement In Sri Lanka Essay

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1.0 Chapter One- THE TRADITIONAL VILLAGE SETTLEMENTS PATTERNS IN SRI LANKA

1.1 History of village settlement in Sri Lanka.

According to the chronicle-the ministers of Vijaya established their own settlement and lived there. Those residences were there after called by Gamas. Gama is heritable property which were occupied sometimes only by members of a single joint family. According to the (Vinya), Gama means a place which may have consisted of even one single “Kuti” or two or more than that. Thus one ‘Kuti’ Gama means a hamlet.
In the Sri Lanka, Sinhalese settlements in particular were most probably confined to a few houses or perhaps to a single one. Although from some later edicts that there were few hamlets in some villages from a Gadaladeni inscription. So that the village Gadaladeni consisted of two hamlets known as Gadaladeni and Haridessa. Significantly, these villages still consist of these two hamlets. The presence of several hamlets in the village is a notable feature in present Sri Lanka.
An average Gama was considered to consist of covenant number of homesteads and all kinds of land attached to it. However the terms also indicate that dispersed settlements which may have included of even one single house with land. The Sinhalese period “Niyam-game” is the large number of villages.

“We feel that if we take games as settlements of kin-groups or occupational and professional groups the Nigama should be taken as agama composed of members of various groups, more or less integrated. The Nigama therefore should be considered as a large and complex Gama, bigger economic unit.” (Hettiarchchi, 1988, p.23)
In Sri Lanka period, the term Nigama is said that it is a village not covered by an enclosing wall but provided...

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... people needs known as “primitive and traditional”. The frequently used terms “primitive”, “traditional”, and “popular” are by no means equivalent. “Primitive” refers to cultures and cultural products that are essentially different from our technologically less advanced than those of the western countries and the great civilizations of the orient “Traditional” is usually taken to comprise all architecture thought of as uncultivated without a conscious style and unrelated to what we think as ‘official’ architecture in each spectrum of regional variants.
(Source: The primitive architecture, p21)

Previously going any further it is necessary to define the term traditional with reference to houses to its here thought of as a well as an architecture phenomenon. In this context it’s generally used with three distinct bit related meanings. First traditional houses form,

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