The new museum opens in Sigiriya
Sigiriya is one of Sri Lanka’s most important and most visited archaeological sites. A World Heritage monument, it presents a unique combination of urban planning, architecture, garden design, engineering, hydraulic technology, painting, sculpture and poetry, and is set in a rich archaeological landscape going back to prehistoric times.
The idea of an archaeological site museum at Sigiriya is more than half-a-century old. In the early 1960s a site museum was built in a honeycomb-like design of a series of connected hexagonal rooms around a hexagonal courtyard. It survives today as a historic building.
When the Central Cultural Fund’s Cultural Triangle programme began at Sigiriya in 1982, the museum had fallen into disrepair and its display had lost its vigour. It had also become an office and a store for moveable antiquities from the Sigiriya area. The Sigiriya Cultural Triangle Project visualised an entirely new museum and visitor-information and research centre, with an on-site conservation laboratory. Three hexagons were adapted, without much change, to serve these functions as a temporary measure. It was 25 years later that the new museum project was inaugurated.
The vision that had been nurtured through these years was of a museum and information centre that would present and complement the site and its archaeological hinterland. Inspired by the concept ‘artefact is text’, it would allow the individual the opportunity of making his or her own understanding and interpretation of the artefacts, plans, models and photographs, with a minimum of ‘technical’ information. Each gallery would plunge the visitor into a direct communication with different aspects of the past.
The artefacts and other displays represent the results of more than a century of archaeological research and conservation by several generations of archaeologists of the Archaeological Department and, subsequently, the Sigiriya Cultural Triangle project.The site chosen for the museum was to the west of the Outer Moat and the Outer Ramparts, directly opposite the Osu Uyana, the botanical garden established in the early 1990s. The garden, formed initially out of an old denuded forest tract and car park is now about ten hectares in extent and consists of a collection of medicinal plants and tree species native to the Sri Lankan Dry Zone. It is also part of the 300 hectare archaeological reserve which is connected to larger forest tracts and an extensive wildlife protection area around Sigiriya.
In keeping with these archaeological and environmental imperatives the museum was seen as a building merged with the forest. It would have the waters of the Sigiri Oya running through it and be of mirror glass, so that ‘one would not be able to say where the forest ended and the museum began’. When one entered the museum one was in the forest. Inside the museum there were dark spaces and ‘when one entered the dark spaces one entered the past’. Framed by this vision and economic and locational considerations, the museum stands today surrounded by forest and water, almost invisible from the axial pathway used by the greater number of visitors, yet accommodating lobbies, galleries, auditoriums, laboratories, offices and stores.
The display is based on twelve thematic and chronological divisions:
1. Geology, archaeological landscape and
periodisation;
2. Prehistory and protohistory;
3. Iron production;
4. The early and later Buddhist monasteries;
5. The’Golden Age’ of Sigiriya: the Kasyapa story and urbanism, architecture, art and garden design in the 5th century;
6. The terracotta sculpture;
7. The paintings;
8. The graffiti poems;
9. Foreign trade and courtly and monastic life;
10.‘The hidden centuries’;
11. The history of archaeology at Sigiriya;
12. Future research.
Each display is prefaced by a short introductory text.
The exhibits – mostly artefacts but also maps, plans, models, photographs, film and audio recordings – spread over six exhibition spaces permit the visitor to directly experience key aspects of the complex archaeology of Sigiriya and the greater Sigiriya area: a full size replica of a megalithic tomb from Ibbankatuva; an actual iron smelting furnace from Alakolavava; a scale model of the Sigiriya rock and gardens under a glass floor; a virtual reality flyover and walk through of a conjectural reconstruction of the palace on the summit; the magical artistry of fragmented and eroded marble sculpture; souvenir figurines in terracotta; copies of the ‘hidden paintings’ on the Mirror Wall, and of the Dambulla muralists version of the Sigiri apsaras ; an impressionistic photo-collage of archaeologists at work during a period of over a hundred years of archaeology at Sigiriya.Building on the work of earlier archaeologists, this agenda is essentially the product of more than 20 years of survey, excavation, conservation, presentation and multi-disciplinary research under the Sigiriya Cultural Triangle project, mostly by dozens of young archaeologists from the Universities and a large number of unnamed workers.
The translation of this agenda into a model of museum display rarely seen in the South Asian region lies to the credit of the joint Sri Lankan-Japanese team of architects, archaeologists, museographers, designers and model makers who undertook this task with a high degree of creativity and professionalism.
