Vedda indigenous bow-hunting archery: wood selection and wild honey gathering rights?
How do indigenous Wanniyalaeto hunters craft traditional longbows (Dunuwa) from Kobbe wood and harvest wild cliff honey (Bambara Peni) in Dambana?
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3 Answers from travellers
The Wanniyalaeto (indigenous Vedda community of Dambana and Nilgala) preserve ancient hunter-gatherer material traditions. Their traditional longbow (Dunuwa) is crafted from flexible, dense heartwood of Kobbe (Allophylus cobbe) or wild bamboo, scraped down with hand axes to match the archer's height. Bowstrings (Lanuwa) are hand-twisted from bast fibers of the Aralu or Niyanda plant, rubbed with beeswax for water resistance. When harvesting wild honeycombs of giant rock bees (Apis dorsata / Bambara) from sheer cliffs, hunters descend hanging liana ladders (Yothiya) at night, smoking out bees with smoldering bundles of green forest leaves.
Arrowheads (Ithala) are forged from iron by village blacksmiths, bound to cane shafts with dried deer sinew and fletched with feathers of the brown wood owl.
Customary legal agreements grant the Vedda community regulated subsistence rights to harvest non-timber forest products inside buffer zones of Maduru Oya National Park.
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