An Archaeological Comparison of Late Medieval Non-Religious Architecture between Kerala and Sri Lanka

Literary sources do not contain much information about significant events that took place in the history of a country, but it is not difficult to find them through archaeological sources. Although, it is difficult to confirm something that happened in history, it is possible if the information obtained from the archaeology matches any picture of the past in line with the sources of historical literature. This study of non-religious architecture in Kerala and Sri Lanka can be called a research of that kind. This study focuses on predominant similarities in non-religious architecture between Kerala and Sri Lanka with an archaeological perspective. The main purpose of this study is to show how an architectural tradition developed in the late medieval period is different from the architectural style used in Sri Lanka until then. Here the late medieval period after the 13th century and here the colonial period is also studied. In this study, the data was collected by conducting field visits to some of the chosen regions of Kerala and Sri Lanka, and the snowball sampling method was used to achieve this. The research required the study of a number of architectural textbooks as well as historical sources in parallel with archaeological sources. After classifying the collected data, the anomalies of the architectural features of the two zones were studied. The study concludes by examining the theoretical factors that contributed to the building of architectural similarities between Kerala and Sri Lanka.